General Game Design Part 1: Basic Competence

Off hand, there are two things I know are important in designing games. Lots of other things are, but this is where I'll start.

At the lowest level, there's the Model-View-Controller pattern. The Model is how the computer 'thinks about' something. The View is how it presents that thing to the player. And the Controller is how the player changes the Model. There are some serious simplifications I'm making here, I think, but right now, I'm not too worried.

At the high level, a game will be in one of several modes. To start up, there's the main menu, which can segue into an 'attract mode'. Obvious modes include the game itself, pausing, changing the settings, and reading help files. An individual level can be viewed as a mode that must be completed to progress in the game. I have no clue whether this modal idea is explicitly part of game design literature, but it's a fairly obvious thing, when you look at nearly any game.

Something specifically related to SRMDWS: for the most faithful animesque look (to match the concept), I'd want to be able to have different objects pick their shading style. People and the rooms they're in get toon-shaded, or something like it, and the aliens and the SRMDWS get a more traditional cgi (some part of my brain popped from the effort of putting those words together) look.

I'm going to lay out the modes and sub-modes at some point, and I feel, as I occasionally do, that the best tool for this is tiddlywiki.