Game Design Workshop: A Playcentric Approach to Creating Innovative Games, Fourth Edition by Tracy Fullerton

Author:Tracy Fullerton [Fullerton, Tracy]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: CRC Press
Published: 2018-08-02T23:00:00+00:00

Form Follows Function

You might have heard the phrase “form follows function.” Louis Henri Sullivan, the architect who introduced this phrase to popular culture, was making the statement that the design of an object must come from its purpose. If you are going to build a building, ask yourself about the purpose of the building before you design the doors. If you are going to build a game, ask yourself what the formal elements of the game are before you design its interface or controls. If you do not, you wind up with a game that looks and acts like every other game.

Today many designers simply revert to saying things like, “My game is Call of Duty, but it is set in a maximum security prison, where you have to escape.” In most cases, the designer will borrow the interface and control scheme from Call of Duty and then design the content to fit within these parameters, with perhaps a new feature or two thrown in. That is fine, and it might be a fun game, but it is never going to be innovative. The key to avoiding producing nothing but clones of existing games is to go back to your original concept and ask yourself, “What is special about this idea?”

In the prison example, the concept was to escape from prison. The conflict is clear: The prisoner must outsmart the security. Now how can you do this in a new way? What does a prisoner need to do to break out of prison? What types of tools and weapons and obstacles are there? As designer, you should play with how to represent the tension of this particular situation and the excitement of it in both the controls and the interface. Experiment with new ways of visualizing these elements, assign them properties, and allow them to interact with one another. As you can see, the interface is coming from the gameplay, not vice versa.

The best approach is never to design the interface first, but let it evolve from the necessities mandated by the function of the game. In other words, form follows function.

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