On creative patterns

Almost all general game designs follow a slightly different pattern, I would endeavor to say that some of these patterns are far more successful than others. One of the most successful patterns I have seen is also one of the least understood and so I would like to give a short summary of it here. It involves 4 steps and roughly parallels to the 4 basic stages of learning how to do art.

1) Replication

"You start off by seeing if you can reproduce something you already know. An artists learns shadows and textures by drawing off of life."

In all forms of art and design, the first initial step is to replicate something you've seen. Replication is an exercise in both vision and execution. You have to see what is important or innate about the game and simultaneously be able to execute it and carry it out exactly.

Without being able to replicate something exactly, you often get the strange feeling that something is missing if you are lacking in vision or that something feels off if  you are lacking in execution.

If, for example, you are creating a first person shooting game, the first step would be to replicate a base that you know, like Doom or something. It does not have to be perfect. The key in this step is to understand what you are trying to create and make sure that you both can see what is there to do and if you can do it.

2) Variation

"Let us place the bowl of fruit in the sky, or paint it as if it was night."

Variation is when you take an already existing form and tweak aspects of it. It is mainly an exercise in coherence. By taking various related objects or concepts and putting them in the same form, you begin to see how things can interact with each other in new ways.

When you fail to do enough variations, it often feels like parts of the game don't interact with each other well because there's a poor understanding of how the various elements can fit together.

Going back to our first person shooter example, variation is when you start tweaking or adding things and seeing how the new patterns emerge. What if you could fly in Doom? (Tribes). What if it was a fantastic setting? (Heretic)

3) Innovation

"From first principles, what if we then painted the impression that a bowl of fruit left to us?"

Innovation is the introduction entirely new ideas into the scene. Innovation is mainly needed as an outlet for creativity and novelty. Only by introducing something entirely new can you achieve things that replication and variation can't. For example, if you abandon the photorealism of a painting and painted merely the effect it had on you, this would be something that perfect replication or variation could not do.

Going back to our first person shooter example, innovation is hard to come by. There are games that dramatically change the way you interact with your environment (Portal, Thief), or games that have deliberately dropped realism for artistic style (Team Fortress).

4) Refinement

"Sometimes we can emphasize our use of color by using only a little bit. A single red flower in a black and white painting is far more powerful than a painting full of color"

Refinement is simply to cut away unnecessary parts of the original form and to add elements to it that make it more streamlined. Just as using washed out colors can serve to emphasize color, removing elements that grab the players attention can serve to streamline attention.  Refinement is the hardest principle to embrace as it involves a deep understanding of what your original idea was and what made it work, the realization of how coherent the idea is to itself and the ability to add new things to streamline the idea.

In our FPS example, Team Fortress is a good example of where stripping away ideas or refinement brought about an increase in playability from the original Team Fortress Classic. Gone are the grenades and some classes. Gone are several "good" things in favor of making "great" things shine instead.