On Being a Game Designer
I, dropping the royal “we” again for this more personal post, am not certain when I decided that I was a game designer. I never decided to become a game designer. I just woke up one day and decided that I was, by default, a game designer.
I more readily think of myself as a computer programmer. It was just that I had programs, like Steampunk Road and my mobile apps, that I wanted to write and there was no one telling me what they should look like or how they should work. Since the games needed to be designed before they could become games, I became a de facto game designer.
Now, I won’t claim to be a good game designer, but I have had some time to think and read and explore what makes for good game design. I am trying to incorporate all of that learning back into Steampunk Road.
For example, one of the things that you want in a good game design is a gentle ramp of difficulty. A game should start out relatively easy, but then start increasing in difficulty as the player learns more about how to play. The difficulty should challenge the player without frustrating her or him. If the game is too easy, or the difficulty stays the same, then the player will quickly become bored.
Steampunk Road has been a puzzle game from the start. The challenge has always been how to write a good puzzle in the era of Google and Wikipedia. I decided early on to expect people to use those resources and started writing puzzles with that in mind.
Surprisingly, writing difficult puzzles has not been a problem. For example, I have recently come up with a new puzzle that, while perhaps easier than our earlier puzzles, may still be quite difficult even with those resources. What has been difficult for me is coming up with easy puzzles! But there is still a lot of room in which to work, so I think perhaps we are working our way back from the end to the beginning.
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