General goals of game design

• Emergent gameplay: players create their own "stories" through interesting things that happen to them, instead of being told a story by the game designer.
  • Systems based: provide many systems that can facilitate emergent gameplay.
• Addressing a specific game design space to support User Generated Content.
  • The "triangle" of 3 genres is:
    • First person shooter: satisfying gunplay.
    • Role Playing Game: quests, items, collecting, upgrading..
    • Survival: Have to work for getting the resources to go from weak to powerful, scarce resources.
  • Give creators of a world/level with the power to create a sub-genre of blending any of the above 3 in whatever way they like.
    • We want to get as far as possible allowing this to be done just by entities: throw tons of enemies and weapons in a world, it becomes more of an FPS, add lots of npcs and quests, and its more of an RPG, make resources hard to get, and its more survival, etc.
    • There will be a way to add custom code to worlds in the future, for even more custom gameplay, but that is not the initial focus.
  • A balance between:
    • Allowing ANY kind of gameplay, which makes it hard to design consistent levels easily and often requires programming.
    • Having only 1 kind of gameplay: doesn't allow creativity in inventing new gameplay.
  • Having many general mechanisms to implement the above genres.
• Single player or Co-op: co-op simply amplifies the fun of discovering what happens next in emergent gameplay.

Other Game Design Notes

More on the general game design direction: Game Design Bias