This is Part Two of a series of editorials by amateur game designer and Blend Games staffer Kurt Bieg dispensing advice on creating your own games. For further advice, check out Part One.

So you settled on a idea for your own video game. That’s great. You finally sat down, listed out your pros and cons, looked at the idea to decide if it’s really something that you can dedicate numerous hours to over the course of what may be years. Now the real fun starts.

The single greatest skill a game developer has is the ability to take something huge, like an idea for a game, and break it down into smaller and smaller parts. Its not unlike those little wooden Russian dolls that you pop open, only to find another slightly smaller doll. You keep going, until there are no more dolls to take apart, now you slowly put each one back together until the whole thing is put back together. Unfortunately, the metaphor neglects to capture the sheer complexity of this task. Perhaps a better metaphor would be something like drawing a picture of a car that you think would be cool, and then building it from scratch, engine and all.

The good news is, you don’t have to know everything about programming languages, and 3D engines, and graphics. The bad news is you should know quite a bit. For instance, you don’t have to know how to program an onscreen character to respond to a keyboard stroke, but you should know how much the character is affected. If the up arrow makes him jump, how high does he jump, can he jump while in motion, is there anything that he can do while the key is pressed, is there anything he cannot do while the key is pressed, what if the character is in the process of another action and then the key is pressed, are there any instances where this action cannot take place. If by now you are sufficiently sick of the up arrow - feel free to look at it disapprovingly.

Why must this level of analysis occur? Here is the overall breakdown as far as I have learned it: When you think of an idea for a game you think about all of the things that it will allow to do. You think about all of the amazing things you will be able to do in your game. You think about running, jumping, interacting; basically, you think about freedom. But just like a car, everyone knows that there is a lot more to it then pressing the gas. If the concept and the end product of the game are all about how much and what kind of freedom you allow the user to experience, then as a game developer, you must create these elements of freedom by creating rules and boundaries. For instance, each time the player hits the up arrow, the character jumps once. The player knows that he cannot hit any key he wants to make the character jump, and yet by giving the player a rule, he feels as though he has some sort of control or freedom.

As a game developer, you must dig to find out all of the little aspects of your idea so that you can break it down into all this easy to swallow pieces. The more you know, the more your game becomes a reality. If you are working alone, you will have to do this so that you can program the little parts and keep yourself from pulling your hair out in frustration. If you are working with others, this process is a make it or break it.

If you really want to see what I’m talking about, search for game design document templates, and just look through a few of them. Not the three or four pagers either, look for the twenty plus page documents. There’s one over at Garage Games. If you’re really serious, fill it out from start to finish. It takes more determination then that final paper you BS’d in order to get that degree.

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