Design Blog

Saturday, June 20, 2009

The Three C's of Design

I've been trying to come up with some interesting ways to express how good design works, and I've been toying with this new idea recently I'm calling "The Three C's of Good Design". The gist of it is that it is the three core skills that someone needs to be successful in design. It's still a new idea that I just thought up a little while ago, so there is definitely room for revision, but I'd like to share what I have so far.

The Three C's of Good Design are:
1. Creativity
2. Confidence
3. Communication

I'll go over each point individually, but before that I want to clarify something. There used to be 4 C's the last one being "Competence" but I thought it was a little redundant, since if you gain the other three you will already have competence. Or rather, having these three skills will make you competent at design.

So onto the individual parts...

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Creativity

This one is probably the most obvious. The job of a designer is to CREATE new experiences in every game and to find ways to make these experiences fun for the majority of the players.

I think it's a little deeper than this however, since simply coming up with the ideas for the experience is only part of the challenge. The creativity of designers has to extend to all aspects of game creation. Besides just coming up with the experience, creativity is needed to solve problems which come up during implementation, it's needed to come up with ways to use the script to support the experience, and it's even when testing levels in order to find new ways to break the very thing you worked so hard to create.

Creativity is definitely a core skill for any designer, but it's important to be creative when it comes to a broad base of design aspects and not just be someone who comes up with ideas, but someone who can see them through to completion.

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Confidence

I think it's important not to take this principle too far, because then it becomes arrogance, which isn't helpful and can be counter-productive in the worst case.

By confidence I mean the assurance to stick with what you think is good design. I think it's fine to look at what the player wants, but also that it's important for designers to understand that even if players say they "want" something, that is not necessarily what the game "needs".

Being confident in your own designs means that you understand what makes them good and recognize when things need to be changed, and also when it's better to stick to your original plans. Changing ideas and levels can happen frequently in the design process, but it's important to maintain a confident stance so that that you know when to stop and finish your work.

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Communication

Probably the least obvious of the three, this one tends to end up being the most important. As a designer, it's important to be confident, but also to realize that the majority of your work will usually depend on the hard work of other people, most often programmers and artists. Very rarely does one person do everything himself unless it's something small like a flash game or short indie project.

The final works of designers require many raw materials that are generally provided by others. While the designer is the one who creates the end result it's incredibly important to recognize and understand the work of those that come before you. Being able to communicate effectively with other designers in a confident manner that gets your creative design ideas across is what allows great games to be made.

Communication with artists and programmers can be difficult sometimes as the differences in disciplines sometimes result in designers seeing things differently than artists and programmers, but being able to communicate and understand the people who are not in the design department is just as important (and possibly moreso) than simply being able to communicate with your fellow designers.

Great ideas and a confident pitch aren't going to get you a finished game unless you can get the idea across to your peers and co-workers.

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And those are the three C's are the things I'm thinking are really important for being a good designer. They are aspects I try to focus on when designing and when working with others. I may think up more in the future, but for now I think these sum things up nicely.

One more thing before I sign off for today. BlazBlue is slated for release 6/30/2009 in the US. Pre-orders are currently available here. I'm still trying to figure out which version I want and where I'm gonna end up shipping it. But I'm definitely going to make sure I pick it up.

Labels: blazblue, design philosophy, game industry

posted by Saikyo at 2:32 PM