Adaptation of Mechanics

We are finally ready to learn about the most exciting creative challenge for game designers: creating the gameplay.

There are many formal definitions of what gameplay is and what it means, and we can say the same about mechanics. Our goal with this book is not to try to give new definitions. We want to stay practical, therefore we'll go with the most intuitive definitions and leave it to you to discover all the studies and implications of those words. For the sake of simplicity, by gameplay, we mean how all the mechanics of your game contribute to creating the final experience played by the players.

We're going to have a quick look at more specific definitions of what game mechanics are later in this chapter. Again, we're going to learn from other game designers and scholars who have already done an excellent job on this, with no pretense to reformulate our own definitions.

Before learning how to create completely new game mechanics, we are going to focus on how to use existing mechanics and change and evolve them to suit your game and the gameplay you have envisioned. We have already talked about the fact that creating a new game doesn't always mean creating new and never-seen-before game mechanics. Understanding existing games and their mechanics and knowing how to deconstruct them and make them work for your game is the key to simplicity.

In this chapter, we're going to learn how to use familiar game mechanics as a starting point to create your own and we will develop a useful framework that, once mastered, will allow you to tackle the challenge of creating something new and fresh based on familiar gameplay patterns.