Game Design Tools: For When Spreadsheets and Flowcharts Aren't Enough

[Music] we'll get started I'm Catherine welcome to my talk on game design tools first I want you to know that I am completely sober I've just come from the women in games lunch and there was a lot of drinking going on but I didn't have a single drink as I knew I was doing this talk so I'm pretty proud of myself about that so thank you well done me yeah so I won't get too excited because I'm not actually drunk so I've been asked to remind you all to do your evaluations and also to turn your phone's off I've turned mine off I think so what our game design tools well they're tools for

helping you solve design problems without having to build playable experiences in order to test out your ideas so they can be conceptual tools diagramming systems or notation systems or they can be software tools that provide computational support and one of the most notable things about game design tools is that the vast majority of us aren't actually using them and this is kind of unusual because creative creatives and other fields do use design tools like a music it would be hard to imagine composing a film score without a notation system and the fact that we generally don't use design tools is something we've been talking about for quite a while some of you might remember reading Doug church's piece and game developer magazine from way back in 1999 where he called our lack of design tools the primary inhibitor of design evolution in games so right now you might be thinking really

but designers do use tools I'm a designer and I use at least three different tools on my current project so yeah obviously designers do use tools in our work we use level editors all kinds of scripting and asset creation tools and of course tools for prototyping and yet we do often use these tools not just to build stuff but also to help us think through our ideas however it's important to remember that these tools are first and foremost production tools or authoring tools and their primary function is to help us produce playable games so their goal is to help you to create data and logic that's bug free and actually runs production tools try and offer in an orderly efficient process that helps you produce clean optimized data that's nicely tidied away and it's usually quite easy to show you how much progress you've made so programmers and producers are very

comfortable with the idea of production and authoring tools but they might come along and look at authoring tools and say how do these weird design tools help us build the game well building isn't really the point of design tools their primary goal is to support thinking so you're broken and big us and even outright contradictory ideas that you have in your unfinished design aren't necessarily treated like arrows or mistakes the idea here is that they're tolerated and supported as a natural part of the design process so what do we currently use to support our design process well traditionally we've developed ideas through writing design documents improvising diagrams working out problems and spreadsheets sliding out gameplay progression structures using flowcharts and and so on and of course more recently we've embraced in

an iterative a iterative process based on prototyping and play testing I think you could call this a design by making kind of process and we've been able to sort of amp up the power of this iteration process with play metrics and data-driven design methods interesting things can happen if you add design tools into the mix so the tools I'm going to talk about today cover a range of typical design tasks such as system design and balancing narrative design gameplay progression design level and mission design and I'm also going to talk about tools that tackle some of the new design challenges we're starting to encounter like the kind of meta design tasks that you might have when designing for procedural content generation for example so we're going to start with tools that have been around for a few years and that you can access right away first up is your s tormentors tool

machinations so machinations is a tool for game system design you can use it to design and balance your overall game loop and its most important subsystems so this makes it particularly useful for games that feature emergent dynamics it means it's a natural fit for board gaming strategy games and management Sims for example and its core machinations is as you can see it's a notation system it takes some notation ideas from designers like Mike LeBlanc Raph Koster Stefan euro and and some other people and it combines this with Petri Nets which is a mathematical modeling language so machinations you use the concept of resource flows to help you visualize your game economy resources could be skill levels hit points money types of consumables or basically anything that you can abstract out and quantify so this diagram here shows the game system

for elite which is of course the 80s based trading game the different shapes of nodes you can see in the diagram function as ways to generate transform or consume resources and the arrows connecting them control resource flow and as well as the notation system machinations is also a software tool so if you run this diagram you can interact a simulation that shows you how resources are moving through the system and the game dynamics that result so here is if I can get it playing yeah so here is an example from my own work where I used machinations to help me balance a time management despite a time management inspired puzzle game so I used machinations to refine and balance my prototype this is definitely a prototype this is the art the art is pretty here so I assure you it's a prototype so sorry I used it to balance

my prototype spawning mechanics for power-ups like speed boosts and by running the simulation I was to get I was able to get a rough abstract visualization of how different spawn rates might affect game pacing I was able to speed these values right back into my prototype as part of it of an iterative process so during this help me make faster progress on my spawning mechanics as compared with simple trial and error and guesswork so machinations is for modeling and balancing your game systems but once you've learnt the machinations notation language it's also great for just quickly sketching and trying out ideas and I've also found it useful for analyzing other people's games and learning from their designs as for limitations while machinations isn't going to be useful for every kind of game it's not really suited to games

with data heavy non-repeating scripted gameplay and even though machinations does allow you to simulate the game system in a real-time and even interact with it don't expect to get an accurate reading of something like game feel if you're looking to gain insight into the player interaction aspect of your design you're best off just making a playable prototype and the same goes for a heavily topographical game Bay it's it's hard to reach to use resource flows to model gameplay that is based on exploration or tactical use of the space so you can download the tool from Euro Stallman's this site but if you really want to get the most out of it I recommend the book that euros co-wrote with earnest own on game system design and this book essentially serves as an introduction to the tool machinations next up is artists II draft which is developed by a company called never go and it's a tool for

narrative design and mission design particularly for RPGs and adventure games it gives you a flow diagram style interface for creating graphic based structures that you can use for things like branching dialogue and mission grabs or skill trees as well as a design tool that can also be used as a fairly sophisticated authoring tool so you can export assets from Odyssey to using your game obviously there are a number of tools out there for writing interactive narrative like inklewriter for example but the key difference here is that artists see also serves as a design tool so because of this it goes a long way to help you visualize and organize your ideas in a way that supports you while while you design and write so I guess some of you here might have used the the writing tools Scrivener it's a really popular tool with writers I think because of this approach right so if you

if you've used Scrivener I think you will understand how powerful this visualization organization can be so for example for an event she game have been working on I found artists II useful for quickly filing away in a new news story or puzzle ideas that just come to me these these ideas I don't know if you have the same issue as I do but they just come at inconvenient times while I'm working on something else and normally you just like note these down ideas down in some kind of design notebook but for me a design notebook can become kind of like a black hole for my ideas so I write an idea down and if I'm not super vigilant about regularly going back and looking through my notes chances are I might not ever find it again or I might not find it when I actually needed but when I use odyssey draft to file an idea I can use it referencing system to sort of tag my

ideas with themes and characters that it might relate to and then use the nested flow diagram structure to basically feel reasonably confident that the idea is likely to be there when and when I need it so it's not in this great big unstructured linear notebook one thing to be aware of though is that while Odyssey is pretty flexible and it has a lot of customization features straight out of the box it is rather heavily skewed towards RPGs and adventure games and finally as I said earlier it does also serve as an authoring tool using it as a production tool has its pros but that's off topic for my discussion here there's where to give it so next up is go out on this and this is a conceptual tool by dan Cooke and it gets you to systematically breakdown your gameplay

into basic units from the point of view of the player experience so these units are called skill atoms and they're basically a description of how the player gains a new skill in terms of the action they perform and how that action translates into simulation and feedback in the game once you have your skill atoms you can connect them together into what's called a skill chain where you're mapping out dependencies between skills so for example if you have a couple of schools like running and jumping they might be prerequisites for the skill running jump so it's kind of similar a skill tree ish in a way but you can use it as a design tool to work out the order in which you introduce new gameplay to the player so skill atoms can be a good framing device for planning out and doing some close analysis of your games scaffolding or your onboarding phase it can help you make sure you haven't missed any details

that could disrupt the play the experience for new players however when I've tried to map out the players skill evolution for an entire game for some games your your skill chain is going to be really big and hard to read and untangle because I think even a simple game can involve a lot of skill atoms so those are tools you can use now that I've just covered net so now I'm going to talk about some of the more advanced and experimental tools that show us some of the ways we might be using technology to support our design process in the future and these tools I'm going to talk about are called mixed initiative design tools so these are tools that use artificial intelligence and procedural generation to assist you with design tasks and this creates an almost collaborative design process between you and the tool it's one of the developments and academic game design research from the past few years that I

think is worth paying attention to so first up the sentient sketchbook this was created by Antonius lis office and it's an AI ai assisted sketching tool for roughing out strategy game maps so what you do is place key features of the map like player and enemy bases and resources and obstacles and while you're doing this the the tool is evaluating your map design for qualities like fairness between players and some aspects relevant to to gameplay pacing it also visualizes paths and choke points while you're sketching it's also creating and suggesting in real-time some more detailed alternative designs based off of what you're doing and then you can bring any of these suggestions into your sketch and continue working with them as part of an iterative process so as you probably gathered the sentient sketchbook is something you might find useful at the great boxing

stage of level design it was originally built for designing strategy game maps but antonio's has been trying to broaden and out to serve other genres as well and I believe he's using on and on an FPS at the moment however it is currently cut quite genres this genre specific and if there are key elements and your game that can't be added to the sketch the problem is that the evaluations and the suggestions it makes aren't going to be super useful to you you're currently limited to four or so preset map sizes so it doesn't give you the chance to edit in much detail but you know that said the point of this tool is to be really rough and high-level here's a link where you can download it bear in mind that development of this tool is ongoing so I hope he doesn't mind me saying this but you should totally contact antonius and

hassle them to add features so that we can use this tool on on wargames so luda scope is an experimental tool for mission and level design it gives you the ability to procedurally generate and manipulate level designs using rules that you create so on the left you can see a level design being populated with enemies and puzzle elements for a top-down action game on the top of the image you can see the empty level and below it is the level after the generation rules have been applied next to it on the right you can see an example of one of these rules being created and another interesting and truly ambitious goal of this tool is to help you transform abstract mission structures with tasks events and goals and to concrete spatial level designs the image on the far right gives an idea of what that process can look like sorry

image on the right yeah that's enough time okay so Luna scope can be used to generate ideas for level layouts or for populating your existing level designs with details but you can also use it to come up with rules and ideas for procedural level generation without having to build a game or do any scripting or any programming perhaps the most valuable thing about Luna scope is that it gets you to think about your level design process and a bunch of interesting new ways for example I now think much more my level design in terms of design rules and patterns even when I'm not using tools I just need to warn you though that Luna scope is not for the faint-hearted it requires you to think really hard and often very abstract ways and it can take a bit of experimentation to figure out which of your design problems can benefit from it so like machinations ludus scope was

also developed by gyro Stallman's he's a very clever guy and you should contact your eyes directly if you're interested in using this tool and being a beta tester sorry again that's his email address so this next tool was built by researchers at the University of Washington Center for game science as you know one from there anyone there you know one here from there I don't want to yeah I've hmm that's easier than it's a level editor for their science puzzle game refraction as well as being a mixed initiative design tool for refractions level game levels it also features computer-aided progression design so if you remember back to school Adams and school chains that I covered earlier so

this progression design feature which you can see on the top right there it's essentially the same kind of way actually it's all those images it's actually the kind of same kind of thing but it uses a matrix style interface and it adds computational support so this means you're no longer dealing with a giant messy graph and I think this shows how powerful even simple computational support for design can be taking you taking you off paper and you know giving you a little bit extra something that goes beyond you know Excel formulas for example unfortunately you can't use this tool because it was built specifically for designing levels for the game refraction but I think it's valuable simply as an idea and I think this idea is what would happen if we started adding support for thinking and solving design problems into our level editing and world building tools like what would that be

like like I think it might be good one thing to bear in mind with this is that refraction is a casual puzzle game with a relatively small feature set and linear gameplay progression so the tools approach would have to be adapted for more complex progression design needs so here is one of my messages for today let's make game design tools so I've shown you some design tools that do a bunch of different things but I think there's more scope for experimenting and trying to make some tools I think the first step is psychological we need to say in this industry we need to say hey we're pretty good at making tools right we're pretty good at making tools that help us build games but maybe it's time we started thinking about making tools that helped us design them as well for another reasons you know I think that's a bigger and arguably much more

interesting challenge no disrespect to tool designers who make level editors so taking my own advice on this here's a tool that I've been developing actually as part of some research I did at the Conservatoire national there's I met you in Paris thanks Stefan for coming and Flinders University in Australia and it's been helping me on my own projects and some other designers projects usually my friends and for this tool I was inspired by the progression planning ideas in the refraction level editor tool that I just talked about and I decided to build a standalone tool that I can use to plan the progression structures for my own games in a variety of genres so for this I gave progress mo a graph based interface to cater for not just linear but also open world and branching structures it also provides some number crunching

to help you calculate and visualize changes to game state to manage things like gameplay gates also to get ballpark answers to questions like when will the player ran out of money or does every pass through this mission provide the player with enough ammo so far I've used this tool on a top-down shooter and adventure game and a casual strategy game and other designers I know have been using it on their RPGs and an open-world game and they've been using it for designing missions or working out how missions fit together and work concurrently within the game I've also been using it to export data for use in a game and also to drive procedural content generation this all was built to help with the kind of problems posed by progression heavy games but you know it's it's not so it's not really suited to games where progression is primarily driven by emergent system dynamics so

for those games you know I would use machinations which is the tall way I talked about at the beginning of this talk so if anyone is interested in using progressive mode please do give me a shout I'm running a fairly low-key closed beta at the moment and I'd love to get more feedback and input so it's my email address there so why bother taking an interest in the obscure fringe and desperately uncool world of game design tools well first off when you're using a game design tool you're adding structure to your process and this gives gives you a way to organize visualize and sort through your ideas in a way that can be quite beneficial another benefit is being able to have what I like to think of as a safe space policy for your design moves and by this I mean that

some of these tools can let you define your own design constraints and then help you to work within those constraints so this can give you a sense of security can free you up to take risks and attempt more ambitious complex designs design tools can also allow you to work on more parts of the design without necessarily waiting for the game to be built or a particular feature to be prototyped lessoning designs reliance on production and finally using design tools can broaden your mind and challenge you I mean they they introduce you to new ways of thinking and these new ways can impact the way you design even when you're not using tools for example I've noticed the way that you know learning new ways to formalize and abstract my ideas has really checked where I go about structuring and noting down my ideas even on paper and in my head there are of course some big

limitations and pitfalls to using these tools some of them take a while to learn and they can require you to think quite hard about how to best to use them on your particular design problem it can be worth it but sometimes you're spending a lot of time and effort before you're getting to a stage where you're really getting value out of them for example with machinations or any notation system you not only have to learn the notation syntax you have to learn how to recognize what good the game mechanics look like in an abstract system level and this requires a lot more literacy than play testing a prototype and asking yourself whether you're having fun design tools tend to formalize and abstract your ideas so some aspects of interaction and game feel are lost and finally if you remember what I said earlier about tools adding structure to your design process well some of you might be thinking and you're right any

tool has its own agenda and biases it acts like a kind of filter on your ideas and by this I mean it emphasizes some qualities that the qualities of your design and it de-emphasizes others but I think as long as you bear this mind tune you you're aware of what the tools agenda is it's not that much of a problem and finally it's totally possible to misinterpret your models and get fake positives and fake negatives about how fun or robust your game actually is especially if you're new to using the tool so here are my suggestions about how to approach game design tools and general my advice would be to adopt a toolbox approach this is because I think the nature of game designers such that no one tool or approach is ever going to cover all our design needs and for all gamers onwards so think of game design

tools is more about adding new approaches and techniques to your existing repertoire so you have a range of tools to to hand to cater for different reads as they may arise in my experience game design tools can help complement other more traditional methods so they can be useful for filling in gaps in your process where you feel you aren't getting enough information within your existing design workflow so briefly here are some examples of workflows where design tools have been integrated I asked Dan cook from spry Fox to well about how he uses tools and his process on games like alpha bear and steam Birds according to Dan when he's fleshing out a new game concept he uses machinations and skill atoms and I help them figure out resource flow the games learn herbal skills and even how the monetization might work and he told me that by doing

this he's able to figure out whether the idea is even worth spending time on to prototype once the game has reached the prototyping stage Dan then uses skill atoms and machinations again this time to analyze problems that the team have identified during play testing one thing that's interesting to note is that Dan uses machinations purely as a notation system and doesn't find the interactive simulation aspect of the tool super useful for his purposes I also talked to the developers of the hybrid platformer RPG wanderer about how they use our to see draft as part of their design workflow the project uses artists II as both a design tool and an authoring tool and they use it for delve developing storyboards and quest ideas that the concept and narrative design stage and then continue to use it to produce their design and narrative assets for the game finally here is the design workflow for an action puzzle game that I've been working on so my

process on this project is that I prototype and play play test some gameplay then I use any game player I've found fun as a basis for abstracting it out into a set of level design patterns and gameplay concepts next I bring these patterns and concepts into progress alone and I create a progression structure for how they're introduced and used over the course of the game then I bring both my design patterns and my progression structure into luta scope and when the ludus scope i generate playable level fable level designs which I then play test and come up with new ideas for design patterns and I keep iterating over this cycle so using a process like this has been interesting because it's allowed me to focus on the high level big picture of the game as well as the low level details but almost simultaneously right instead of the traditional stage based process of having to lock down key aspects of the progression and gameplay before they

before the levels are designed and I'm not doing this in code I'm doing this with design tools so I hope that's given you a bit of an introduction to what game design tools are and if you're still interested I hope you do some of your own research to find out more I don't think we have any time for questions but I'll be in the wrap-up room wherever the hell that is but thank you very much you you