Thread by @MorelloNMST

Tonight, let’s discuss goal-oriented design.

A misconception of design I see pretty often is that it’s this ultra-creative field where ideas, inspirations, or taste are what makes a designer create great things.

This is in there, but it’s nothing without goals.

Goals are the primary North Star of a design. Whether it’s as something as big as the entire game or something as focused as a balance item on a patch, goals help us determine if our design is on the right track.

It helps us use something other than taste and preference.

I think one of the most important steps to do is set good goals. Good goals can look like the ones you might set in life! But to be specific;

* An outcome you want to see
* Some thing you could measure it against
* Criteria for it being complete

These goals though can be quite broad. They can be about a player’s self reported experience, or some quantifiable measure in the game. It could be about the game product being more cohesive.

It could be a lot of things! But it’s critical to define it and share it.

Let’s take a couple examples.

You want to nerf a character with a high win rate. That might seem like a goal in and of itself, but it’s not - a high win rate character is a potential problem statement.

Without a goal, how you want to do it and what you aim to achieve are lost.

Some things might seem like obvious goals, but are not;

“Get this characters win rate to 50%”
“Make the game less frustrating to play”
“Ensure the game is balanced.”

These aren’t goals, but they might be components in them. Good goals talk about the impact of the effort.

Some better potential goals are;

“More competitive team comp variety”
“Players feel their character choices matter more”
“Reduce oppressive play that the enemy has to face.”

There’s a trick here, though; all these things assume these are things you care to achieve.

Much of the goal setting around individual design elements have to inherit from goals about the wider game.

If we don’t care about comp play variety, improving it is not useful.

Let’s take that problem and apply it to a gatcha RPG with PvP;

Competitive variety is likely a less important goal in a game like that than “protect players’ investment” is. That goal could indeed undermine the one for this game.

This is why design is rarely a simple fix even here; each goal deprioritizes others!

So when setting good goals, one of the lost important bits is to understand the overall goals and priorities, and hook into them.

Great goals for an individual piece that don’t fit well into the overall product are actually dangerous. IMO much of early lol suffered from this

Let’s take a look at our example, again. We can use a competitive pvp game here.

We see our character with a high win rate. The first question should be “Do we want to nerf them?” not how will we.

50% win rate is not a goal in and of itself. What outcomes do we want?

Why is the most important part of design. Assuming things unstated as a given, or making assumptions that a thing is good or bad without a rich understanding of why is almost always a mistake.

It’s one of the biggest errors amateur and news designers make.

Asking why is not an internal process, either. You share those goals, socialize them and get feedback. By doing so, you get new perspectives and explore “why” more fully.

Strong opinions are fine here, but willful ignorance is not.

That’s a later thread, though...

Goals get you started, and help you be focused on making sure you k ow why you even want to do what you’re doing.

Understanding why is a lot of work, and you always are learning more about why. Never feel you understand it all the way, or truth is likely that you don’t.

Tomorrow we’ll discuss the loop of design, and now that we have goals, we can move into the next step; form a solution.