The Roadmap of Rule Creation

What the talk is about

Yelyzaveta Lemeshko, a game designer at Bigpoint, offers a practical roadmap for creating game rules. She separates rules (what a player may or may not do) from mechanics (how it actually plays out) and describes the game as a 'magic circle' that players enter voluntarily. She shows how to write a rule set — objective, setup, turn flow, edge cases, win and lose conditions — and two ways to classify rules, including a hierarchy of global, local and situational rules. She then works through three scenarios: fixing rules in a live game, adding new rules without breaking existing ones, and building a rule set from scratch through playtests and documentation. She closes with how producers, developers, QA, community managers and analysts each read the same rules. Useful for game designers at any level.