How to Build a Game #25 What Makes Your Game Special?

What makes your game different?

When you are building your games, designers need to think about what makes their games different. It could be anything, it could be the art, a neat twist on a mechanic or theme. Even though there are the tens of thousands of games out there, there is still a lot of room within a game’s design to give it something different.

Keeping in mind what makes your game different as you design the game will help you to highlight that element as you construct the rest of the game’s mechanics. Think about the rest of your game acting as a funnel to bring your players back to the unique elements of your game.

When you build your game in this frame of mind, you can use a lot of common mechanics and themes because the focus will be on the one element that is really interesting. This is really important because while we have a lot of tools to work with in the game design world, we still need to come up with ways to make them interesting to our players. If you use the common elements of the game world to funnel gamers to your unique take on a theme or mechanic you will bring familiarity to your games with a spice of your design style.

If you have any comments or questions, leave a comment here or email Chris at c.renshall.tgik.games@gmail.com

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If you have made it this far, would you like to go a little farther? We have a regular Google hangout with other designers. We talk about the games we are working on and share helpful tips and ideas on how to make designing our game easier. We meetup every other Saturday. Either comment here or tweet me or email me and I will add you to the list and send you a link to the Google hangout.