Steps for creating a new game

Play is powerful stuff. I had the tremendous good fortune to take part in Play4Agile, an Unconference on games for Agile teams held near Frankfurt, Germany two weekends ago. It was a tremendous amount of fun and a really intense learning experience — there were so many skilled and enthusiastic people there to learn from and create with that a goodly number of new games were generated over the course of the weekend.

One of the (many) really helpful sessions I took part in was a session on designing games organized by Antti Kirjavainen and Ole Jepsen. I’d already started collaborating on a game with a small gang of people, and we all attended this workshop in order to figure out where to go next with our ideas. Annti gave us a road map for developing a new game:

1) Vision: Why should people play this game? What will they learn? What will they achieve?

2) Identify:

• Objectives – what are the intended outcomes of the game?
• Constraints – what the limitations for the activity (how may players, how long might it take, what supplies are available)?
• Use contexts – who will use this game and how?

3) Brainstorm! – generate a pile of ideas for building a coherent activity

4) Define the game concepts:

• what do the players do?
• what is the goal of the game?
• when does the play end?
• what are the game objects?
• what are the main features of the game?

5) Generate test questions to evaluate the game:

• Is it fun?
• Are the players engaged?
• Is it scalable?
• Is it potentially viral?
• Do players get the intended ideas?

6) Create a prototype

7) Play test

8) Consider the answers to the test questions based on experience, and go back to step 4.

While this map is simple, creating a game itself is not, thought an idea can grown into a game quite quickly.  My next post will get into the nitty-gritty of how we put together the first version of “Nobody’s Perfect” in about 5 hours.