Prologue

Imagine a scene… Golden rays of sunlight are shining through the window. Tiny particle of dusts are glittering as they float slowly through the air. There is a faint sound of children giggling outside, somewhere in the distance. The air is warm, and so is the soft quilt covering the bed. Faint smell of old paper and printing ink is filling your nostrils. The glass of soft drink feels presently cold as you grasp it in your hand. The ice cubes jingle gently. The soda bubbles pop and hiss…

Imagine another scene… The neon light keeps on flickering. It’s cold cyan glow is irritating. It is too faint to properly lit up the room in which you are, yet it is intense enough to hurt your eyes. You can see a wall. Cold, hard, unyielding concrete, painted pale grey with sickly green hue. The floor is covered with white ceramic tiles. Dry stains of coffee coloured splatter lead to a drain, a dark, round, gaping hole in the ground covered with a metal grill…

Small hints can evoke powerful emotions. The sound of a can of Coke being cracked open… The hue of light in the late summer afternoon… Visual and sound cue can set the mood of the scene. The words alone can create the sense of immersion into the setting. It’s a cheap trick but it works!

These small elements are important building blocks of narration helping to create an emotional bond with a reader of the book, a viewer of the move or indeed player of the game.

It is this emotional connection that you, as a game designer, should seek to create. People play games to be entertained. We feel the sense of fun on a deeply emotional level. Emotions are a way by which our subconscious mind tags experiences, marking them as important or fulfilling, i.e. something worth remembering.

The connections created on the emotional level are much stronger and long lasting than any the memories of particular details. You might have forgotten the details of that Nintendo game you loved so much as a kid but you still get that warm and fuzzy feeling when you think about it.

However, many game designers, especially when it comes to free-to-play, mobile games, seem to forget this simple thing. If your strength is in the game systems design, and you focus on retention of players, you can easily drift into creating mechanistic designs, a set of rules that might work well on paper or in Excel spreadsheets, but is utterly devoid of soul. I admit, this is a pitfall that I myself have fallen into too many times.

The better way

Recently I stumbled upon a 2017 whitepaper on the design of so-called cozy games, and it was an eye-opening experience!

While I am fascinated by the concept of cozy games itself, it is the systematic approach that the authors took to define the concept, that really caught my attention.

The authors begin by defining a feeling that they want to focus on. They define a specific emotional state that they want their game to elicit in the player. In their case, this is a sense of coziness, described with a set of adjectives such as safety, softness, and abundance.

Afterwards, they specify a list of emotions that partially overlap with the concept of coziness, for example, such as cuteness, memories of childhood, romance, etc.

In the next step, they proceed to list a set of notions that stand in contrast to the feeling which they want to evoke, emotions like fear, sense of danger or threat, design patterns such as extrinsic rewards or artificial resource scarcity, etc.

Finally, they proceed to discuss the means by which a sense of coziness can be evoked in a player of the game. They list the relevant:

• General aesthetic patterns of coziness,
• Game design patterns and mechanics that reinforce the feeling of coziness,
• Cozy visuals and audio elements,
• Cozy narrative patterns,

They even proceed to list the items, locations, and character archetypes that can be characterized as cozy.

In this way, they are actually creating a sort of a game design moodboard. By doing this, they put the desired emotion in the center of their design process!

This moodboard is a reference to which they can always return to evaluate their own game design ideas. Furthermore, they define a set of tools and a palette of game design elements that all serve to reinforce the particular feeling that their game is supposed to be centered on. The whole game, it’s every aspect is designed to reinforce the same general mood!

In this particular whitepaper, the authors focus exclusively on sense of coziness, however, the same approach can be used for any type of emotion or complex sensation.

People play games to be entertained, but they can be entertained in multiple ways. Just like a book or a movie, a well-crafted game can elicit all sorts of emotions in the player.

Building your own moodboard

You can try to replicate a similar process and apply it to your own game design needs.

Begin by selecting a particular mood or feeling that you want your game to focus on.

• For example: creepiness.

Try to put the definition of this sensation into words.

• For example: creepiness is eeriness, sense of unseen danger, sense of dread, feeling of unease, etc.

Discuss with as many people as possible to dig for ideas and reach the common understanding of the emotion you are trying to elicit. Different people will find different things to be creepy, but there is bound to be a huge overlap. Clowns for example? Right?

Define contrasting feelings.

• Antithesis to creepiness can be a sense of security, pleasantness, coziness, etc.

Define overlapping and adjacent concepts, the ones that share some traits with your target, but are yet distinctly different.

• In the case of creepiness, these can include: gore, terror, existential horror, nausea, feeling of helplessness, feeling of being lost, etc.

Proceed to define the aesthetic elements:

• Creepy visuals: darkness, dim faint light, cold colors, etc.
• Creepy materials: stone, metal, ceramic tiles, rust, wet surfaces, cold surfaces, reptilian skin, viscera, etc.
• Creepy audio: sound of creaky floorboards, sound of footsteps in the distance, sound of heavy breathing, sound of one’s own heartbeat, sounds of insects, sounds of hissing, sound of rumbling machinery, etc.
• Creepy locations: abandoned buildings, empty streets, crypts and cemeteries, abandoned amusement parks, old hospitals, derelict bathrooms, narrow corridors, confined spaces, old castles, ruined churches, dark forests, etc.
• Creepy items: broken toys, broken baby strollers, old photos, chains, medical instruments, hospital beds, etc.

Use this list of elements as a reference to evaluate your design whenever a new design element is added, or use it as a source of inspiration. Let the artists in your team use it to create an actual art direction moodboard to be used to define the visuals.

Keep iterating and improving this list as you go by adding to it to refine and reinforce the general direction in which you are heading.

This approach is explicitly designed to be holistic, where every aspect of the game is there to reinforce the overall experience. In this way you can circumvent the common problem of soulless games.

In addition, because all aesthetic aspects of the game work in unison, you do not need to rely on conveying the narrative of your game in terms of story lines and dialogs. The narrative will emerge from the setting of the game and can be reinforced by minimal means of snippets of dialogue or text.

Ideally taking this approach would result in a more coherent game in terms of the emotion that it aims to create. Emotion should result in a deeper connection with the player.

Of course, this is not meant to be the ultimate design method. It is just a tool which you can use in conjunction with all other tools in your game designer toolbox. Combine this with some solid game system design and you should be on to a winner.

Bonus

To help you out I created a tool. I call it a Game Design Emotional Canvas. You can download it and use in your own project. There is also a helpful example on how to use it if you want to design a creepy game.