How I got into Game Design
History
From a young age, I have been analyzing games, trying to find the best strategy and came up with game concepts of my own. This started with board games I played with my family at the age of five. Later, I came up with a game that was essentially a tabletop strategy game with playmobile figures (before I had ever heard about what a miniature wargame like Warhammer 40k was).
When I was nine years old, my father introduced me and my smaller brother to probably the most influential game of my life: “Das Schwarze Auge”, a german tabletop roleplaying game like Dungeons and Dragons. I got absolutely hooked on the game and we played it for hours on end. Once I knew everything about it, I became the game master myself and held long sessions with my classmates after school. And now, many years later, Iam hosting game session for my own tabletop RPG (Scales of Fate).
When I was 13, I discovered a new high with technology-powered games. I saw somebody play Word of Warcraft and it blew me away. The thought of an entire world you can acntually see and hear and where compared to physical games, the PC does all the tedious game rule, math and moving pieces work for you. It still fascinates me to this day.
This is, what inspired me to write down the ideas for my dream game a Tabletop RPG but online with technology: an MMORPG. The document has over 200 pages now, and I am still writing on it. Later, when I heard about designing games being a profession, I remember thinking of course, somebody has to be designing all these games. I had never thought about it that way before, but I quickly became very clear to me that designing games was what I wanted to do. Because it was exactly why I already had been doing and loved doing for most of my life. After researching how to get into Game Design, I found the Games Academy and this what lead me to the path of a Game Designer.
What I play
Though I like to talk a lot about MMORPGs, I have played a more of MOBA-type games. Mainly League of Legends – my first big video game love when I got my own PC at the age of 13 but also games like Clash Royale, my favorite mobile game of all time.
Besides MMORPGs and MOBAs, strategy games manage to capture my analytical mind. The likes of Age of Empires and Lord of the Rings - Battle for Middle Earth played a bit part in my early video game days. Recently, I picked up FTL: Faster than Light – an strategy roguelike set in a stratek-esque universe; and I immediately fell in love with it.
Philosophy
"Good design is simple."
I don't remember where I got this from, Steve Jobs certainly seems to agree and Leonardo Da Vinci once said somethings similar;
but for me, it perfectly encapsulates one of the most important lessons for game design and design in general. There are many things games try to do, but probably the main one is to create emotional experiences. And human emotions are complex. So, if you want to invoke something complex, it is relatively easy to create something complex. The real art is to create something simple which invokes something complex. So in a way, the word simple actually stands for efficiency, not just simplicity.
This also needy ties in with the MDA-framework, where one of the hallmarks of good game design is that many dynamics arise from few/simple mechanics and, in turn, even more aesthetics from these dynamics.
While writing down game ideas and developing game, there are always more problems that pop up and need to be solved. So, I solved them but in order to do so, I often had to add something to the game. Over time. this started to pile up and my designs became more and more complex to the point, where even I started to struggle to fully grasp them – let alone, how this would be for the players. I started over, threw away bigger parts of the game and created them anew. First, it looked good, but then, as I started solving many small problems with additional rules and mechanics, the design became too complex yet again. But on the way, I had found that some problems could be solved by taking away a rule, not adding one (design by subtraction – Ueda Fumito). Other times, one simple tweak or small additional rule could solve multiple problems at once, a hallmark of a good solution.
Designing games now, I always strive to find as few and as simple rules as possible that still achieve the complex desired emotional experiences the game shall invoke.