Experience Design vs Mechanics Design

Cyber Heist is ramping up to get ready for publishing, and its a very different experience from the earlier semesters.

We plan on being feature complete by next Thursday, and our focus is shifting. Where before a lot of development was "lets test that out, build it real quick", the process is focusing more and more on polishing the features that are already there and not accepting "good enough" implementation any more.

I've been putting a lot of thought into the different kinds of game designers while this focus has been shifting, mostly because its newer, more foreign territory to me. I have a theory that there are two different kinds of game designers: experience designers and mechanics designers.

I see myself as a mechanics designer, the kind of person who sees every mechanic the game has and understands not only a new mechanic's impact on the game as a whole, but the impact that it has on each of the other mechanics as well. While this knack has come in extremely handy for the development of the early game, I suspect that the second type of designer--the experience designer--would be much more helpful at this point.

Experience designers see and understand the feel of the game and the mood they want to set. They are able to look at any aspect of the game and tell you exactly how that adds to the experience, in both look, feel, and interactivity. Experience designers know exactly why every part of a game ties into the player's experience, and know exactly how they want a story to unfold during a play experience. While I can do my best to help make those pieces fit, I have nowhere near the knack that would make this part of development a cakewalk.

My theory is that you need experience designers at the beginning and the end, but not at the middle. A good experience designer will set the stage for amazing growth in the game and allow mechanics designers to develop unique mechanics that make sense with the story and the world that was loosely created. However, games are games, and without the ability to freely explore different ways to make the gameplay work, the experience designer will restrict the mechanic designer's ability to actually make a game that is compelling to play without the story lifting it up.

Both designers should have their time to go free-reign on the game without answering to the other type of designer. Experience designers should be the ones that start the game and create the world without worry for how it needs to structurally work, and then mechanic designers should have their time to truly play in that space. After an awesome, mechanically based game has been created out of a well-designed setting which the experience designer has set up, both designers need to work together to bring that experience home.

For a long time in this program, I'd struggled with people's perception of Andrew, who I didn't consider to be a great game designer despite coming up with the idea for Cyber Heist. While I'm sure that Andrew has since grown and become a much better designer than he was a year ago even, I believe that it was me clashing with his very strong experience-design approach. It's only right around this time of the game creation process--when polish, story, and feel of the game is coming into place--that I understand what experience designers truly bring to the table. As long as both can respect the importance of the other, amazing games can be created.