When I’m thinking of an idea for a game it starts usually in a totally inopportune moment with this idea: Wouldn’t it be great to get people who play a game to feel like they are experiencing some sort of emotion? 

That was certainly true of the original Dungeon Keeper. I don’t focus on the mechanics, I don’t focus on the narrative, the story, or even the platform. I focus on what I want the player to feel. In Dungeon Keeper’s case it was, and Dungeon Keeper didn’t really explore this fully, but I wanted people to feel what it was like to be the bad guy, to be the evil dude who, if you’re watching a James Bond film, always gets fucked over by James Bond parachuting in and pressing one button and destroying your life’s work. And the games world had never really explored the intention or the background or the problems that megalomaniacs have, whether they be creeping around with a golden gun or hollowing out the centre of a volcano without anyone finding out about it. The sheer engineering feat of that far outweighs any evil intention, let alone the staffing problems. I mean just how do you get 10,000 people to help build a volcano. What do you put on the job advert?

In Black & White’s case, it was what did it feel like to be responsible for teaching something? And in Fable’s case, what would it feel like to have the freedom to be any sort of hero, however good, or however evil?

So it usually starts with that thought around a feeling that I want to give to a player. And then, after thinking about those feelings, the next thing is the setting. Is it going to be in space? Is it going to be under the ground? Is it going to be in some fantasy world? Is it going to be in some kind of totally made up world or the real one? So the setting comes next, and all of this is going on inside my head without really writing anything down.

And I should make a note here that normally when I’m designing a game, and this is just me, it’s actually a terrible idea, so if anyone is reading this and thinking, right, this is how to design a game, don’t do this! I think, because of my dyslexia, I prefer not to write things down. I mean, you have to write things down when you’re communicating to a team, but in the early days, I think once I’ve written something down, I feel subconsciously that that’s it. It’s written in stone, there’s no more changing it. If you keep it inside your mind and keep mulling it over and thinking about it and wondering about it, and being very curious about how this idea evolves, then it’s much more likely to be fluid. And being fluid allows me to play around a lot with an idea. 

There’s an example of this in the evolution of every game I’ve ever worked on, but if we take Black & White as an example, it was literally, “let’s do a game about a big creature that you teach using AI.” 

That was kind of it. But playing around with that idea and thinking about it, thinking, if you’re going teach a creature, it needs to be powerful. If you’re going teach a creature, you need to be able to interact with it, and that gave the creature scale because you had to be able to see all those things, so Black & White started with a huge King Kong like creature which dominated the landscape. This feeling of you influencing something so powerful and huge could lead to interesting and novel choices. 

So in the early days of a game’s birth, there’s a lot of exploration of an idea in my own mind. 

Now the downside is you are depending on yourself to remember all that shit. Because it’s so easy to get excited about something, especially when under the influence of a mood enhancer. It’s very easy to forget about.

But then I always think if you forget about it, it was probably shit anyway.

I think of an idea for a game as like a thread. You start thinking about one element of an idea, and very quickly and quite nimbly, your brain goes, well, that means this can happen and that means this can happen. And those threads are all linked to some common route. I tend to let my mind just run freely over those different threads.

What I’m really doing is creating the cornerstones of what an idea actually is. I think what I’m trying to get at here is that you’ll see these threads start to appear in this blog, and when I talk about an individual idea or element of an idea, you’ll see how that unfolds.

The side effect, the downside of working like this is that you can forget about everything and you can get very lost in the idea itself. One of the upsides, which is what I find quite nice, is that you can walk into a room and say, I’ve got a new idea for a game, and people will say, what is it? And you’ll explain what that idea is, and then lots of people will ask you questions and you can just snap the answers off. You can say, you do this and you do that, and the player sees this and the player sees that, and the world will expand and it looks like you’re kind of making it up as you go along. Where in actual fact I’ve probably thought deeply about a lot of what I’m saying.

Quite often though, when people do talk about it, when you do reveal it finally to a team of people, then the act of blurting it out causes my mind to make the connections, which perhaps I hadn’t consciously made before.

If I was a proper designer, if I’d gone to university and studied game design, then surely I would write these ideas down and there would be this holy grail in design called a design bible, the design document. And very often when I have presented games to people like publishers and even the press, they’ll say this dreadful line: where is the game design document? Well, unless you ship me over with every game, there is no game design document. So, you know, if I was more sensible, I would absolutely spend the time writing a game design document.

The problem with being dyslexic and old is that I don’t really have a choice. It’s not that I refuse to write a document, it’s just simply that I’ve tried to do it before and I get writer’s block. The trouble writing something down is that it’s linear. You start and you finish it. Sure enough, you can start in the middle and you can do other bits. But the way I find myself working is that sometimes I’ll be talking and then this idea will come up and I’ll tell the people I’m talking to to hang on while I think about that thought, and as I’m doing that the ideas are expanding, which just doesn’t happen when I try to write it down.

Secondly, the act of typing or even talking is so fucking slow. It’s just way too slow. By the time I’ve typed this game is about, my brain has gone right, fuck all this, let’s think about what the credits are gonna look like or something ridiculous like that, so it’s not that I have a choice. I’m sure I could train myself to do it, but at 64, those days of training yourself to do something different I think are long gone.

And I’ve lost my train of thought, so let’s stop here. Enough introspection, let’s start exploring this idea. In the upcoming blogs we will start to do just that.