Becoming A Game Design Hero

What the talk is about

David Mullich explains how to design games around the player's experience rather than genre. He suggests first deciding what the player should feel, using the "five domains of play" model: novelty, challenge, stimulation, harmony and threat. Then start with the simplest version, add one feature at a time and playtest with the target audience, and define a "creative center" for the game to filter out features that don't belong. The main part covers balancing: an item's cost should reflect its benefit and how likely it is to be used, and a payoff table helps with rock-paper-scissors mechanics. He draws on his work on Heroes of Might and Magic 3 and 4, where calculations were done in Excel. In Q&A he recommends books and tabletop games for learning. Useful for beginner and experienced game designers.