Designing Fun Games

Designing a co-operative card game takes a significantly greater effort than I'd originally anticipated.

I'm surprised because I'd already anticipated it taking quite a bit. What's challenging about the Square Root of Steam (name subject to change) is that its not only a co-operative card game, but its style is different than any game that either Mik or I have played, and possibly any game that exists. We've had literally hundreds of ideas that we've discussed, scrapped, improved on, crossed out, and so forth. For anybody interested in developing a game that's both new and actually fun to play, heed my warning:

It is not easy.

I'm excited because I'm learning so much about the game design process. While I've learned around a dozen really important things, I can narrow it down to the four most important lessons so far:

1. Fun is the most important aspect of the game. This might seem obvious, but its easy to get distracted over balanced mechanics or making the game the right level of difficulty for the player. If a game is too easy but still fun? Great! You've made a successful game. That mechanic is not totally balanced with other mechanics but everyone loves it? You win. Don't be afraid to design something that you think "doesn't work" if the result is something that ends up being fun for the player.
2. Story and context of the game are incredibly important. I tend to focus on mechanics and balance over story and flavor, but sometimes even clunkier mechanics can be more fun because of the context you're playing in. For instance, the game Ladies and Gentlemen is clunky on purpose--but its very fun because its silly and ties in with the game theme. Mechanically excellent games with little story canend up being less fun simply because there's less context for the player to relate to.
3. Games are very rarely too hard. Games need choice, and choice requires making mistakes. Players should be able to make several sub-optimal choices and still succeed. If you're designing a game, nobody on earth knows the game better than you, and if you can't beat it without thinking, its probably too hard. See #1.
4. Playtest all the time, especially in the beginning. If there were a formula for "fun", we'd have found it and have made the perfect game already. Fun is about how the player feels, and no amount of well-thought-out design can make up for a quick playtest session to see how your game feels to someone playing it. You'll end up wasting way more development time than you need to by developing something that a simple playtest would have revealed isn't fun at all.

Again, there are other lessons, but these stand out most clearly AND relate to the things that I've been told over and over again in the EAE program. Hearing good advice and understanding good advice are two very different things, and I'm excited to be able to incorporate that advice into how I design games.