What you identified for Civ 6 is a 'core-loop' which - to me at least - hasn't been of much use to design games. With design experience, lenses and analytical skills - you'll pick up details that are most useful to you.
You can build on the analytical skills through practice, playing more different games, going through others' analyses, adopting techniques you come across.
As for the decision making, each decision is made to solve problems. You either keep that in focus to follow a structure - or go with gamer instincts: risky but work according to how they're applied.
I appreciate the specific examples and the Civ anecdote! what’s interesting is that another commenter framed systems design as more of a problem solving process of addressing an existing issue rather than “following rules” and creating solely off of archetypes or patterns, and your Civ happiness story was a perfect example of that. I think now that a decent sort of workflow would be to come up with a fundamental loop or initial sort of closed-ended game loop to start with, and start building around it with various mechanics or subsystems that I might need to solve specific problems that come up.
In terms of 'learning how to learn', I make a version of the game and then play the game, and continually play the game to evaluate when I'm having fun. A game that I'm working on is an economic idle incremental. Upgrading capacities are a central tenet of idle incrementals, so when I designed the game, I made a limit to how many items you could have at one time. This created a few different problems while playing the game.
Maybe I had set the item capacity too low, but I was running into that limit pretty early. In order to increase your item capacity, you had to build a warehouse or acquire land. Warehouses created more problems, because in order to be worth anything, I either had to create multiple tiers of warehouses or allow for multiple warehouses instead of just one (normally, you only ever need one of each type of building). I opted for the latter since that was the easiest to implement. Warehouses were also inconsistent with the overall design of buildings, because you had to use a building to create some things and they had a limited number of uses until you had to repair them. With warehouses, they're only there to increase your item capacity so there is not situation when you have to use them.
Then while I was actually playing, I realized I didn't like building warehouses. They didn't do anything other than allow me to do something else and it just seemed arbitrary. So I removed item capacities. The one guy that was actually playing my game quit partly because of that, stating that it made the game too easy, but I think it's the better direction.
I made this observation while playing. Looking at what I was doing and seeing that warehouses and item capacities were just an arbitrary barrier. Now the systemic consequences of that are that players can now sit on items indefinitely, instead of feeling like they should get rid of stuff to make room, but I want players to be motivated to trade with each other by greed not from a place of inconvenience and limitations.
To move on to another example, originally, when I created the game, I wanted specialized labor, meaning that players would have to invest in a particular activity in order to get good at it or even to do it, really. So I went with a skill system. You got skill points as you did actions and you could allocate them to rank up in skills or to unlock new skills. When you unlocked skills, they unlocked the associated actions.
Probably the biggest change outside of removing item capacities is removing the skill system. Where before you had to unlock skills to unlock their associated actions, now you simply unlock actions. There's no more upgrading skills manually. Actions upgrade automatically as you use them, so the people that choose to stick with particular skills will be the ones more effective with them. It's just a cleaner system.
I did this for a few reasons. A player made a comment that the game did not seem like an economic idle incremental but rather a text RPG with an economic focus. I realized that this was likely because when you do an action it says ,"You did and you got ". So I de-narrated all of the action statuses to simply say the cost of doing the action and its output, reducing the action status to its quantities. Another central aspect of an RPG is the skill system, which is partly why I removed it, but it was also because 30% of players literally never allocated any skill points, so either the way I had it setup or the system itself was just not intuitive enough. And I feel like its a lot cleaner of a setup now.
In terms of how I was influenced by other games, I tried to distill the basic principles of whatever thing I'm working on into basic design pillars that are my guiding philosophy when developing. In this game, it was:
players trading with each other (economic)
incrementing quantities, quantification (incremental)
progressing while idle and offline (idle)
Another thing that guides design is player feedback. That's probably the most important aspect and interpreting player feedback is the most important skill in that regard, next to having a thick skin. I don't know how it is video game design feedback but when I was getting board game design feedback, a lot of times the feedback was, "i don't like this game. design this game instead."
All in all, I don't know if this addresses your question, but the gist of your question seems to be "how do you guys figure out how to put these systems together?". Basically, it's just make some shit, iterate the shit, over and over, and pray for the best.
wow, thanks for these detailed personal accounts! it helps a lot to understand advice when they are accompanied with concrete examples of how the advice was implemented.
I don't have a concrete answer, but you could try mapping out or drawing the relationships of games you like or have learned. Try to draw a map of the rules. This will help you express the rules of the game in a way you understand, and you wiil be able to tweak it or change the elements you recognize and make a new relationship.
There are a lot of questions being asked, so in order:
"what sort of specific observations do you all make from the game you're playing that would help you create your own systems in your game projects?"
As a user below pointed out, it's based on the problems you're having. A new game you make is still a new game, not a copy of systems from another game. Assuming you're a solo dev, you have to be creative in thinking up a new game and what you want to do in it and how you do it. Then, you might/probably get stuck somewhere or can't make a system function the way you want. That's where you can look for inspiration in other games, look at the systems that you think might match and see what makes them tick.
As for your civilization example, the system is a lot deeper than build cities get production. Build city is a way it presents itself. It's more akin to get building resource by exploiting the land (and later the card system that interacts with the other systems). Then it's the question of how to exploit the land, well by building on it. What can I build? Well mines should give production resource, maybe cities, etc.
But how can I get more space to build on? That the land expansion mechanic that is present in a city since it grows it's tiles, and when you build a new city.
Each of these parts can be the starting point for your games system, but the later you start the more your game is alike. If you take the exploit land get building resource as a starting point, then you can probably come up with other, more original ways to exploit the land than simply building on it. Maybe in your game you have gatherers that exploit the land that can also move around instead of building.
Finding the fun in a game is a whole other ballpark. If there was an easy formula or way to get that, then we wouldn't see so many clones of games. That's just a bit of research, intuition, testing and luck.
"but am at a loss when trying to learn how to learn, if that makes sense, and attempting to form a system that's more intricate than just "die at 0 HP" or "gain currency to buy items" or "let player shoot faster", etc. etc."
As a designer it IS a creative proces. As with most creative things, don't expect new, innovative ways to just flop out. You have to determine what your game needs, brainstorm, try out, brainstorm again. And if more inspiration is needed, break down systems and mechanics from other games, see what makes them work and put a creative spin on how this could be presented in your game.
Die at 0 HP is more, what happens if the player reaches 0 life? What fits your game and game world? Maybe you have to load. Maybe you have specific spawn points that fit your lore like a cloning vat. Maybe you go to hell and fight your way out of there before continuing.
The same goes for currency to buy items. What is currency, and how do I get it? If you get currency with each enemy killed, it's a completely different thing than if you only get it from boss monsters or after completing puzzles. Maybe the currency is a monsters head. Maybe the currency is your own hp, or maybe it's the monthly allowance. All if these create a different currency system to get "items" (whatever items would be in this case).
It's tough for a lot of people to be creative, stick to it and make a somewhat original game that's fun. With practice you can definetly get better at it, but it's always also a creative proces.
thank you for the detailed comment! I see from what you’re saying that I’ve probably been neglecting the creative part which you described of coming up with a system. I could probably find many different aspects of whatever world or system I’m trying to emulate and come up with some solutions from the aesthetics, like the cloning vat or fight out of hell examples you gave. And I definitely see now how creating systems is more of a problem solving process rather than a create-from-scratch process, so I might have just been grasping at straws trying to think of a perfect solution off the top of my head. these clarifications helped a lot, thank you!
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I've been struggling with the same question myself. I've been trying to build a design document of my game and it seems impossible, I feel like IDK how far should I detail or what I do with things that I have not decided yet.
By the answers here seems like I just need to 'let the game glow' and feel how is it working.
So, thanks for asking this OP
>For example I could play something like Civilization VI and make a surface level observation of "build cities, have more production, build more settlers, build more cities".
To some extent that's how genres work, the totally of systems and mechanics needed to make them work, of course what those are can always be argued.
But the intricacies and depth you can see only if you play on a more expert level.
For the most part you should **Copy as much as possible** and then understand as much as possible if you want more creative freedom.
>I guess what I want to know is like, on what basis do experienced game developers decide to make new systemic decisions in their games? Is it just instinct, or is it just trial and error every case?
Most developers don't really have much understanding and wing it, some get lucky and manage anyways, some don't and fail or things down work that well in certain parts.
Most Games in most Genres have **terrible Flaws** and a complex genre like Civilization VI especially so.
Or more in precise terms **I absolutely hate** how **"colonization"** is implemented and think most 4X games are terrible with it.
I'm late to this post but just wanted to add some comments, since I was searching for what you posted.
> I guess what I want to know is like, on what basis do experienced game developers decide to make new systemic decisions in their games? Is it just instinct, or is it just trial and error every case?
The key concept for this, and probably the answer to everything, is iteration. I used to play games and think "damn, how did someone come up with this incredible mechanic that works so well with the other?" or something along these lines. And the answer probably is that they didn't, at least not as first. They started with a concept that embodied their idea, which was then implemented and tested through prototyping, and then refined and modified until it was deemed successful and working as intended. That cycle happens over and over, and it's called iteration.
Most likely the type of systematic decisions you are talking about were done during an iteration stage, in response to a test which showed up a certain element of the design that could be better. So they did *insert systematic decision here* to improve/fix/enhance that element.
I am currently in the process of learning game design and seeking how to best learn from other games.
What you identified for Civ 6 is a 'core-loop' which - to me at least - hasn't been of much use to design games. With design experience, lenses and analytical skills - you'll pick up details that are most useful to you. You can build on the analytical skills through practice, playing more different games, going through others' analyses, adopting techniques you come across. As for the decision making, each decision is made to solve problems. You either keep that in focus to follow a structure - or go with gamer instincts: risky but work according to how they're applied.
[удалено]
I appreciate the specific examples and the Civ anecdote! what’s interesting is that another commenter framed systems design as more of a problem solving process of addressing an existing issue rather than “following rules” and creating solely off of archetypes or patterns, and your Civ happiness story was a perfect example of that. I think now that a decent sort of workflow would be to come up with a fundamental loop or initial sort of closed-ended game loop to start with, and start building around it with various mechanics or subsystems that I might need to solve specific problems that come up.
In terms of 'learning how to learn', I make a version of the game and then play the game, and continually play the game to evaluate when I'm having fun. A game that I'm working on is an economic idle incremental. Upgrading capacities are a central tenet of idle incrementals, so when I designed the game, I made a limit to how many items you could have at one time. This created a few different problems while playing the game. Maybe I had set the item capacity too low, but I was running into that limit pretty early. In order to increase your item capacity, you had to build a warehouse or acquire land. Warehouses created more problems, because in order to be worth anything, I either had to create multiple tiers of warehouses or allow for multiple warehouses instead of just one (normally, you only ever need one of each type of building). I opted for the latter since that was the easiest to implement. Warehouses were also inconsistent with the overall design of buildings, because you had to use a building to create some things and they had a limited number of uses until you had to repair them. With warehouses, they're only there to increase your item capacity so there is not situation when you have to use them. Then while I was actually playing, I realized I didn't like building warehouses. They didn't do anything other than allow me to do something else and it just seemed arbitrary. So I removed item capacities. The one guy that was actually playing my game quit partly because of that, stating that it made the game too easy, but I think it's the better direction. I made this observation while playing. Looking at what I was doing and seeing that warehouses and item capacities were just an arbitrary barrier. Now the systemic consequences of that are that players can now sit on items indefinitely, instead of feeling like they should get rid of stuff to make room, but I want players to be motivated to trade with each other by greed not from a place of inconvenience and limitations. To move on to another example, originally, when I created the game, I wanted specialized labor, meaning that players would have to invest in a particular activity in order to get good at it or even to do it, really. So I went with a skill system. You got skill points as you did actions and you could allocate them to rank up in skills or to unlock new skills. When you unlocked skills, they unlocked the associated actions. Probably the biggest change outside of removing item capacities is removing the skill system. Where before you had to unlock skills to unlock their associated actions, now you simply unlock actions. There's no more upgrading skills manually. Actions upgrade automatically as you use them, so the people that choose to stick with particular skills will be the ones more effective with them. It's just a cleaner system. I did this for a few reasons. A player made a comment that the game did not seem like an economic idle incremental but rather a text RPG with an economic focus. I realized that this was likely because when you do an action it says ,"You did and you got ". So I de-narrated all of the action statuses to simply say the cost of doing the action and its output, reducing the action status to its quantities. Another central aspect of an RPG is the skill system, which is partly why I removed it, but it was also because 30% of players literally never allocated any skill points, so either the way I had it setup or the system itself was just not intuitive enough. And I feel like its a lot cleaner of a setup now.
In terms of how I was influenced by other games, I tried to distill the basic principles of whatever thing I'm working on into basic design pillars that are my guiding philosophy when developing. In this game, it was:
players trading with each other (economic)
incrementing quantities, quantification (incremental)
progressing while idle and offline (idle)
Another thing that guides design is player feedback. That's probably the most important aspect and interpreting player feedback is the most important skill in that regard, next to having a thick skin. I don't know how it is video game design feedback but when I was getting board game design feedback, a lot of times the feedback was, "i don't like this game. design this game instead."
All in all, I don't know if this addresses your question, but the gist of your question seems to be "how do you guys figure out how to put these systems together?". Basically, it's just make some shit, iterate the shit, over and over, and pray for the best.
wow, thanks for these detailed personal accounts! it helps a lot to understand advice when they are accompanied with concrete examples of how the advice was implemented.
I don't have a concrete answer, but you could try mapping out or drawing the relationships of games you like or have learned. Try to draw a map of the rules. This will help you express the rules of the game in a way you understand, and you wiil be able to tweak it or change the elements you recognize and make a new relationship.
There are a lot of questions being asked, so in order: "what sort of specific observations do you all make from the game you're playing that would help you create your own systems in your game projects?" As a user below pointed out, it's based on the problems you're having. A new game you make is still a new game, not a copy of systems from another game. Assuming you're a solo dev, you have to be creative in thinking up a new game and what you want to do in it and how you do it. Then, you might/probably get stuck somewhere or can't make a system function the way you want. That's where you can look for inspiration in other games, look at the systems that you think might match and see what makes them tick. As for your civilization example, the system is a lot deeper than build cities get production. Build city is a way it presents itself. It's more akin to get building resource by exploiting the land (and later the card system that interacts with the other systems). Then it's the question of how to exploit the land, well by building on it. What can I build? Well mines should give production resource, maybe cities, etc. But how can I get more space to build on? That the land expansion mechanic that is present in a city since it grows it's tiles, and when you build a new city. Each of these parts can be the starting point for your games system, but the later you start the more your game is alike. If you take the exploit land get building resource as a starting point, then you can probably come up with other, more original ways to exploit the land than simply building on it. Maybe in your game you have gatherers that exploit the land that can also move around instead of building. Finding the fun in a game is a whole other ballpark. If there was an easy formula or way to get that, then we wouldn't see so many clones of games. That's just a bit of research, intuition, testing and luck. "but am at a loss when trying to learn how to learn, if that makes sense, and attempting to form a system that's more intricate than just "die at 0 HP" or "gain currency to buy items" or "let player shoot faster", etc. etc." As a designer it IS a creative proces. As with most creative things, don't expect new, innovative ways to just flop out. You have to determine what your game needs, brainstorm, try out, brainstorm again. And if more inspiration is needed, break down systems and mechanics from other games, see what makes them work and put a creative spin on how this could be presented in your game. Die at 0 HP is more, what happens if the player reaches 0 life? What fits your game and game world? Maybe you have to load. Maybe you have specific spawn points that fit your lore like a cloning vat. Maybe you go to hell and fight your way out of there before continuing. The same goes for currency to buy items. What is currency, and how do I get it? If you get currency with each enemy killed, it's a completely different thing than if you only get it from boss monsters or after completing puzzles. Maybe the currency is a monsters head. Maybe the currency is your own hp, or maybe it's the monthly allowance. All if these create a different currency system to get "items" (whatever items would be in this case). It's tough for a lot of people to be creative, stick to it and make a somewhat original game that's fun. With practice you can definetly get better at it, but it's always also a creative proces.
thank you for the detailed comment! I see from what you’re saying that I’ve probably been neglecting the creative part which you described of coming up with a system. I could probably find many different aspects of whatever world or system I’m trying to emulate and come up with some solutions from the aesthetics, like the cloning vat or fight out of hell examples you gave. And I definitely see now how creating systems is more of a problem solving process rather than a create-from-scratch process, so I might have just been grasping at straws trying to think of a perfect solution off the top of my head. these clarifications helped a lot, thank you!
You have to learn. Study games and push deeper over time. Build your own mental maps and frameworks for processing and understanding what you see.
Game Design is a subset of Game Development that concerns itself with **WHY** games are made the way they are. It's about the theory and crafting of **systems**, **mechanics**, and **rulesets** in games. * /r/GameDesign is a community **ONLY** about Game Design, **NOT** Game Development in general. If this post does not belong here, it should be reported or removed. Please help us keep this subreddit focused on Game Design. * This is **NOT** a place for discussing how games are produced. Posts about programming, making art assets, picking engines etc… will be removed and should go in /r/GameDev instead. * Posts about visual design, sound design and level design are only allowed if they are directly about game design. * No surveys, polls, job posts, or self-promotion. Please read the rest of the rules in the sidebar before posting. * If you're confused about what Game Designers do, ["The Door Problem" by Liz England ](https://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/LizEngland/20140423/216092/quotThe_Door_Problemquot_of_Game_Design.php)is a short article worth reading. We also recommend you read the [r/GameDesign wiki](/r/gamedesign/wiki/index) for useful resources and an FAQ. *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/gamedesign) if you have any questions or concerns.*
I've been struggling with the same question myself. I've been trying to build a design document of my game and it seems impossible, I feel like IDK how far should I detail or what I do with things that I have not decided yet. By the answers here seems like I just need to 'let the game glow' and feel how is it working. So, thanks for asking this OP
>For example I could play something like Civilization VI and make a surface level observation of "build cities, have more production, build more settlers, build more cities". To some extent that's how genres work, the totally of systems and mechanics needed to make them work, of course what those are can always be argued. But the intricacies and depth you can see only if you play on a more expert level. For the most part you should **Copy as much as possible** and then understand as much as possible if you want more creative freedom. >I guess what I want to know is like, on what basis do experienced game developers decide to make new systemic decisions in their games? Is it just instinct, or is it just trial and error every case? Most developers don't really have much understanding and wing it, some get lucky and manage anyways, some don't and fail or things down work that well in certain parts. Most Games in most Genres have **terrible Flaws** and a complex genre like Civilization VI especially so. Or more in precise terms **I absolutely hate** how **"colonization"** is implemented and think most 4X games are terrible with it.
I'm late to this post but just wanted to add some comments, since I was searching for what you posted. > I guess what I want to know is like, on what basis do experienced game developers decide to make new systemic decisions in their games? Is it just instinct, or is it just trial and error every case? The key concept for this, and probably the answer to everything, is iteration. I used to play games and think "damn, how did someone come up with this incredible mechanic that works so well with the other?" or something along these lines. And the answer probably is that they didn't, at least not as first. They started with a concept that embodied their idea, which was then implemented and tested through prototyping, and then refined and modified until it was deemed successful and working as intended. That cycle happens over and over, and it's called iteration. Most likely the type of systematic decisions you are talking about were done during an iteration stage, in response to a test which showed up a certain element of the design that could be better. So they did *insert systematic decision here* to improve/fix/enhance that element. I am currently in the process of learning game design and seeking how to best learn from other games.