If you can't clearly state your Target Game Experience, your design is running blind.

You don't have a team-shared goal to strive for, you don't have a concrete reference to base your decisions on, and your design could collapse at any moment. Defining Game Pillars makes clear the Emotions and Sensations aspect of your Game Direction. The team has something to evaluate game elements’ coherence, discussions are much more focused, and you have a clear destination to lean to.

This week, I'll show you 3 reasons why you must define Game Pillars for your game. If you have doubts about Game Pillars, you can check out the previous episode.

Game Pillars make up half of your Game Direction.

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Here they are:

• They Clarify The Target Game Experience
• They Set A Clear Team’s Goal
• They Act As A Filter For New Ideas

Without further ado, let’s jump right in.

#1: They Clarify The Target Game Experience

Every Game Director wants to make a “beautiful experience”.

The problem is he never says what the experience consists of and in what sense it’s “beautiful”. This ends up with every team member saying, “Yeah, that’s great!” (who would say no, actually).

However, they will do so not based on one common experience but only on what they have in mind. Every single team member has his own idea of what a “beautiful experience” is made of. And it’s not fair to blame them since there’s nothing explicit from the Game Director(except using the adjective “beautiful”, which means nothing).

Teams are initially a bit confused, but they can get away with it justified by something like “We’re still at the beginning”. But in the medium-long term, if they never address the issue, it gets bigger, and it leads to constant misunderstanding about the direction of the game.

Not addressing this issue until mid-development can break projects and teams very quickly.

Game Pillars (and Game Direction in general) can solve this big problem.

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Game Pillars make everyone agree on something specific.

As we’ve said in the previous episode, Game Pillars describe the emotions and sensations part of the Game Direction. It’s essential to remember that Game Pillars don’t set the route but the destination.

And once you’ve built the Game Direction, the path between where you’re now and where you want to go is the essence of Game Design. By properly defining Game Pillars in the Concept Phase, you save yourself massive headaches. You gain clarity about what emotions and sensations you want the player to feel.

And what Game Pillars represent goes way beyond saying “beautiful”.

Having this clarity always available encapsulated in a few but effective sentences makes you understand what you’re doing and why.

#2: They Set A Clear Team’s Goal

Team members need a stable reference to judge coherence.

Game Development is a multidisciplinary effort, and everyone needs to be on the same page. If everyone follows his own direction, the game, more often than not, results in an incoherent patchwork mess. To make everything coherent, team members need a concrete reference. Something clear in their mind they need to align with any time they shape an idea or produce game content.

To be an effective reference, this “something” must be stable and not continuously change.

Game Pillars fit this role perfectly.

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Game Pillars are not just useful for Game Designers.

Even artists, programmers, composers, etc., need to know what Target Game Experience the team is trying to achieve. Having well-constructed Game Pillars allows all team members to work with a shared and common goal. Discussions will be based on Game Pillars and how decisions adhere to or go against them, and not on personal tastes.

As a result, productivity increases, and risk is lowered. This also avoids sudden changes in direction and crazy ideas that could make managing the project timeline difficult.

The team has something concrete to base their work and decision-making process on.

#3: They Act As A Filter For New Ideas

You can’t bring in every new idea any team members come up with.

Whenever a new idea appears, it’s easy to get excited and think about adding it to the game. But you better be careful about it. A raw idea can be a double-edged sword, and it needs to be evaluated from various important perspectives. How it ties in with the game elements already present, but also its feasibility in terms of project schedule and team skills.

But before them, you need to ask yourself if and how the idea fits into your Game Direction.

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Game Pillars are the first and most important check for new ideas.

First and foremost, you need to assess how many Game Pillars the new idea respects. And then decide whether it makes sense to add it to the game and with what priority compared to the rest.

It’s crucial to do this check before design, technical, and budget evaluations. It would be a huge waste of time finding out after hours of work (maybe even with preliminary tests) that the idea is not compatible with the Game Direction. So technical checks are important, but Game Direction ones (for both Game Pillars and Thematic Structure) must come first. We’ll see how to do the Game Pillars check in further episodes.

This reminds us again that the most important thing is not the game itself but the experience generated. So go define your Pillars if you haven’t yet!

Game Pillars reveal and clarify the emotional structure of your Target Game Experience.

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Key Takeaways:

• Game Pillars make everyone agree on something specific.
• Game Pillars are not just useful for Game Designers.
• Game Pillars are the first and most important check for new ideas.