So, let’s just walk through the whole thing, end to end. Here’s a twelve-step program for understanding game design.

Some of you may not like this deconstructive view on how games are designed. That’s okay. Personally, I find it best to poke and prod at a problem, like “how do I get better at making games?” and treat it as a game. And that’s what I have done my whole career. The above is just my strategy guide. Someone else will have different strategies, I guarantee it.

But I also guarantee that if you get better at the above twelve things, you will get better at making games. This is a pragmatic list. And it will be helpful for making narrative games, puzzle games, boardgames, action games, RPGs, whatever. I breezed through it, but there are very specific tools you can pick up underneath each of these twelve things. It really is that simple, but also that hard, because that’s a frickin’ long list if you want to actually dive into each of the twelve.

What that also means is that people designing games fail a lot at it. You might say, “can’t they just do the part they know how to do, and therefore predictably make good games?”

No, because players learn along with the designers. If you just make the same game, the one you know how to make, the players get bored because it’s nothing but problems they have seen before and already have their answers to. Sometimes, they get so bored that an entire genre dies.

And if you instead make it super-complicated by adding more problems, it might dissolve into noise for most people. Then nobody plays it. And then the genre dies too!

Game designers will routinely fail at making something fun. When the game of making games is played right, it is always right outside the edge of what the designers know how to do.

That’s where the fun lives, not just for the designer, but also for their audience.

That’s it, the whole cheat sheet. That’s it.