Complexity is the enemy of game design. Not everyone will agree with that statement, but in my experience, when designs get complex, it usually means something isn’t right.

One thing I look at when a design is getting complicated is whether it has a clear and primary focus for the game - something the designer can use as a guiding principle when they make the thousands of little decisions along your path to shipping a game. This is something I liken to the dreaded question faced by millions of college bound teenagers: “What’s your major?”.

When you start your college experience, you’re confronted with an incredible diversity of courses and possibilities. You could dedicate your lifetime to study (some do) and only scratch the surface, but most people are only going to spend 4(ish) years going to school, so you need a way to narrow things down a bit. How do you choose? You could pick and choose your classes individually, but how do you know that the sampling of courses that you choose will form a coherent foundation of skills and knowledge when you come out the other side? That’s where choosing a major comes in.

When you declare a major, a lot of things fall into place. There’s a set of courses that build on each other to form your core curriculum - you hardly have to think about those, since they are chosen for you by people who have already been down this path. Within a declared major, there’s still a lot of room for choice. You can specialize within your major (e.g. studying robotics as part of a CS degree). Those are pretty narrowly focused decisions, but they can still have a dramatic outcome on your education. On top of that, there’s room for electives to round out your experience (and make you a less boring person) - or you might go so far as to picking a minor or an independent study.

But still - there’s only so much time, and you can’t do everything. There are always classes you want to take that don’t fit - and those are hard to give up. The important point here is that declaring your major provides a structure that forces these trade-offs and provides you a guiding principles for making smart decisions. You probably see where I’m going with this...

Pick a major for your game

How does this relate to game design? Well, like college, game designs start with a near infinite set of possibilities. As designers, we have tons of great ideas we want to weave into our games. It’s really hard to say “no” to a great idea - just like it’s hard to say no to that English class you wanted to take in college. But also like college, there’s only so much time (and so much money) available to make our game. It’s our job as designers to make sure there’s a coherent and build-able game that comes out of our process.

So I say to designers: pick a major. Pick something that you are going to do really well, and do the hard work to build that core into something as solid and fun as you can. From there, go ahead and add some electives to round it out - but all the features, controls, UI, characters and plot points of the game should be in support of your major.

Choosing a major up from might be hard, but a million decisions after that will be a lot easier as a result. Pick a focus, give it your all. Not only will it help you make decisions, but players will feel it and appreciate it too. Whatever that core is, it will resonate with the player and give them some grounding as they play your game.

But what if I choose the wrong one?

Choosing a major can suck. It's a decision filled with "what if's" that could plague you for the rest of your life. When I went to school, I ended up picking the wrong. I was a naive teenager, and I spent a year trying to be a chemical engineer without really understanding what a chemical engineer was. I wasn't very good at it. You know what I figured out? You can change your major!

In school, changing your major is hard. It has implications on time, money and/or flexibility. You might end up going to school longer to catch up on courses for your new curriculum - or you might graduate in the same amount of time, but end up just not having nearly as many free choices along the way (because your previous major filled up all those elective slots). Changing your major isn't free - but you can do it.

The same applies to games. You can change your mind about the core of your game - but you'll pay for it. Time is usually the cost - games that change focus usually take more time. Sometimes taking more time isn't an option. In that case, you pay in scope. All those bells and whistles you wanted to add (electives) start disappearing one-by-one.

You can mitigate the cost of changing focus by changing early. That's where prototyping comes in. Prototype early - figure out if you chose the right major for your game. If not, then change it. Don't add features hoping that it will all work out. Build a solid core - then build around it. It’ll make your life easier, and more importantly, players will feel it.

And remember - there's always the next game. Whether it's a sequel or an entirely new property, there's a place where those ideas that you left behind can come back to life.

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This post is from a series I'm calling "wayward designer" - which are brief glimpses into how I think about my own design process. This is my personal approach, and doesn’t claim to be the "right" way of doing things. There are plenty of successful designers out there who I deeply respect that approach things very differently. Take what's useful, create a process that works for you. Make great games and share them with the world.