Creating games can be really fun, extremely satisfying, and a great outlet for self-expression. But if you’ve never tried making a game before, it can feel really intimidating to give it a shot. As someone new to the field, where are you even supposed to start?
Luckily, I’ve got an easy game design exercise that is perfect for everyone. It’s the exercise I started out with when I got into game design, and anyone can do it regardless of age or skill level. Check it out below, and then I’ll go through why it’s such a great gateway into game design.
Game Design Exercise: Modify A Game
Step 1: Choose a simple game that you’re familiar with.
Ideally, you want something that is fast and easy to play. Some games that work really well are Tic Tac Toe, Rock Paper Scissors, Tag, War, and Go Fish.
Step 2: Play the game.
You just want to play it enough to get yourself familiar with the rules and how the game feels to play.
Step 3: Add or modify one of the game’s rules.
You can choose any rule you want, and you can make it as mundane or wild as you want. If you’re having trouble coming up with a new rule. here are a few examples to give you some inspiration:
For Tic Tac Toe, you could change the size or shape of the play grid.
For Rock Paper Scissors, you could add in a new hand sign.
For Tag, you could give the person that is “It” a special ability.
For War, you could have it that players draw multiple cards and choose which one to play each round.
For Go Fish, you could let players bluff that they don’t have a card in hand when their opponent asks them for it.
Step 4: Play the game with your new rule!
Try to pay attention to how the new rule changes how the game feels to play. Do you find it more or less enjoyable to play? Does anything in the game suddenly feel overpowered or underpowered? Did the game break or get stuck while you were playing it?
Step 5: Repeat steps 3 & 4 until you’re satisfied with your new game.
Sometimes you won’t like a rule you added, and it’s totally fine to change it back. But try to keep adding new rules in one at a time until your game feels completely different than the original game.
And that’s it! But why is this such a great introduction into game design?
The main reason is that it teaches you everything you need to know about iterative game design in an easy, hands-on way. If you’re new to game design, you might think that game designers create games like this:
Come up with an idea.
Make the game.
Release the game.
In reality, game design is much more about trial and error. Here’s how you actually make a game:
Come up with an idea.
Try it out.
Analyze if the game feels like how you want it to feel.
Make a change to try to make it feel better.
Repeat steps 2-4 forever.
Eventually stop and release the game.
Taking Captain’s Gambit as an example, we went through dozens of iterations to get it to where it is today. Hell, Richard alone had at least 7 different versions during development! This process for making the game is the same as what you just did in the Modify A Game exercise. The only change is that instead of coming up with the starting idea, you built off an existing simple game.
But coming up with a starting idea can’t be too tricky right? I’m sure if you bunker down and brainstorm for a while you can come up with dozens of ideas for cool games. So once you’ve tried out the exercise, try it out again. But this time, instead of starting from an existing simple game, start out on your own unique idea and see where it takes you.