Design Pillars: What's Your Game Really About?

The Intention of Your Game

What is the intention of your game?

That’s a very vague question, I know. So let me clarify. Each game has several philosophies that determine its general vision and scope. These are called design pillars.

These design pillars establish the core principles of a game and define what kind of an experience and emotions it tries to deliver. They are the basic elements of the game you are making. Or as Tim Cain puts it in his video on design pillars, they are the intention of your game.

Examples

Let’s look at some examples. Here are Destiny’s seven pillars of design:

1. A World Player Want to Be In

2. A Bunch Fun Things to Do

3. Rewards Player Care About

4. A New Experience Every Night

5. Shared With Other People

6. Enjoyable By All Skill Levels

7. Enjoyable by the Impatient and Distracted

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Here are some of Fallout’s design pillars Tim Cain shared:

1. Mega Level of Violence

2. No Right Solution

3. Player’s Action Affects the World and World Reacts to Player’s Actions

4. Sense of Urgency

5. Open-Ended

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God of War’s design pillars shared by Rob Davis during his GDC talk:

1. Combat

2. Father/Son

3. Exploration

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As you can see, the number of pillars and what they are vary from game to game. Sometimes they're a game mechanic, sometimes they're just a concept. But what they do is the same and that is defining the creative direction of the game.

Why you need design pillars

1. They create focus: As Rob Davis says, they define what you need to focus. Because not knowing what you need to focus can lead to development paralysis.

2. They constrain you: They prevent you from being a feature creep, helping you stay true to your core vision.

3. They help you make decisions: They make the decision-making process easier, helping you decide whether to include or remove a mechanic, level, or any other element.

4. They make marketing easier: Since they also act as your unique selling points, they help you communicate your game’s features and find you audience.

5. They create a unified vision: For teams involved in the development process, design pillars create a shared understanding of the product, which is crucial for fostering collaboration.

How to apply

So, let’s get practical: How do we create our pillars? It’s hard to come up with a specific way since these are vague statements and can vary from genre to genre. But here are couple of steps that will give you a starting point.

1. What's Important to Your Game: Write down what really matters for your game.

2. Feeling First: Think about the vibes and emotions you want players to feel.

3. What Makes You Unique: Consider what sets your game apart from others.

4. A Couple More Tips: Throw in some extra random ideas to spice things up.

5. Keep Refining: It's not a one-time thing. Keep tweaking your pillars as your game takes shape.

So, circling back to the original question: What's the intention of your game? What's your game all about? Figuring that out, with the help of design pillars, is like drawing a map that guides your game in the right direction.

Sources & Further Reading

What are Game Design Pillars? How to Apply It Without The Downside?

How pillars and triangles can focus your game design

A Short Guide To Game Design

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To-Do

Read: How to Create Skies for 3D Games?

Watch: This one mistake is killing my game

Learn: Level up your code with game programming patterns: Command pattern | Tutorial (and a free PDF on Programming Patterns)

Play: Hex It Up!

Check out:

The Complete Learn To Code Bundle

Make Your Own Games In Unreal Engine 5 (Bundle)

Kickstarter: Three Cubes – an online voxel-based sandbox platform

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Me

Reading: The Dark Tower 1: The Gunslinger. I didn’t enjoy it that much, honestly. But the ending was good enough to make me continue with the series.

Watching: Blue Eye Samurai.

Playing: Baldur’s Gate 3.

Listening:

Thanks for reading!

And that’s it from today’s issue of GameDev’s Journey. I hope you enjoyed it and found it useful. If you did, please like and leave a comment. Reach out for suggestions, objections, questions, or just say hi.

But regardless, thank you so much for reading, and have a great game dev journey.