XplanaZine

The following exercise is designed to help you design a simple, stand-alone, interactive game concept. This is the same process I use when working with the team at my company or when consulting with schools or other companies to design games. This exercise is best completed with a small group of creative people.

• Write out a description of your target audience — This is the place to start. The audience shapes many of the variables or parameters for later decision making. Key components to consider are age group, school or university level, assumed previous knowledge, vocabulary levels, preferred learning styles, and preferred cultural references.
• Based on your personal knowledge and experience, make a list of ideal game components — This is where you get to walk down memory lane (if you’re older) or simply think back to the game you were playing last night and make a list of everything that really works for you. There is no right or wrong thing to put on the list, but you want to make it as comprehensive as you can. Think of everything possible — from rewards and scoring to puzzles and preferred combat weapons. Remember, these ideal game components do not have to map specifically to your target audience or the particular game concept you are trying to create. You just want as comprehensive list as possible of things you think work well in games.
• Create a Learn-Feel-Do matrix — Okay, now the work begins in earnest. The Learn-Feel-Do matrix is where reduce your “ideal” list into a matrix of specific elements that you feel must be present in your current game (we made the ideal list to make certain we didn’t leave anything out in this one). This will become your checklist and should represent as accurately as possible your target audience and product objectives in terms of learning components and objectives (Learn), the feelings or reactions you want the game to stimulate in the game user (Feel), and the specific actions that must be present in the game (Act).
• Define the general parts and desired outcomes of your game — Now, if you haven’t already done so, write out a 1-3 sentence description of your game in the most general terms possible. Be as abstract as possible as you don’t want the description to put too many limits on the creative brainstorming in the next step.
• Brainstorm as many ways as possible to address those parts and outcomes with game concepts — THIS IS THE FUN PART. There are no wrong answers here. Just throw out every possible game concepts that comes to mind. Don’t worry about cost, appropriateness, or anything else. The only criteria is that each concept has to fit the general description.
• Rate your proposed concepts on your Learn-Feel-Do matrix – In this step, you want to step back and put your concepts on the The Learn-Feel-Do matrix .Take each concept and rate it in terms of the number of essential elements from the matrix it addresses, and in terms of appropriateness for the target audience.
• Select the top two or three game concepts and measure their design capacity and flexibility — The previous step should provide a fairly accurate breakdown or hierarchy of the proposed game concepts. From this breakdown it should be a straightforward activity to select your top candidates.
• Settle on a final concept — Okay, be nice to the other people on your team! Fight fair and remember that the concepts you don’t select will be reused later so there are no real losers here.
• Write our a complete set of game specifications — With a good concept in hand, you’re now ready to write out the real game specifications. I usually like to write out a comprehensive set of learning objectives as well as complete sets of user stories as an introductory step to the actual specifications.
• Create design wireframes in order to test your selection and assumptions regarding Information Architecture and Usability — Now it’s time to make your first models and see if your brilliant idea is as brilliant as you thought it was. You should show these wireframes to different people (at least in informal usability testing) and make sure you’ve captured everything in your game specifications.
• Complete the game — All that’s left is programming the game and pushing out for students to learn and have fun! Seriously, if you haven’t done this before, I suggest releasing your game in Alpha, Beta, and Gold versions and completing rounds of QA testing and bug fixing for each.

I think you’ll find this process to be helpful when it comes to simple game concept design. In future weeks will address other types of educational game development such as rile-playing simulations.