Goals
Just about every game has a few goals, a direction. It's the basic principle of game design. Chris Crawford call it 'verbs' and "What does the player do?". Some games call it a 'design philosophy'. Other game designers simply call it "What makes the game fun?".


Examples
Dungeon Crawl provides the most direct example to its design goals. In comparison with older roguelikes, it has a quick and addictive feel. And it's possible to master without reading any spoilers at all.

Sonic has an obvious goal: Speed. You're supposed to get to the end of the level as fast as possible. The game doesn't punish you for being slow; it rewards you for doing things quickly without thinking too much about it.

Mario appears to be fine without a goal. It has pipes, mario-eating flowers, coins, mushrooms, flowers that let you shoot fireballs, bullets with eyes... huh? Well, I suppose that's an exception. It could be that the goal is to keep giving you something you didn't expect? Warioware was built with that in mind.

X-Com doesn't seem to have set down a real goal. But there are things that make an X-Com game. You're expected to move constantly: never stay still. The aliens are much stronger: you have to rely on tactics. And permanently losing your guys is all part of the game: you have to make the choice whether "winning" was a good or bad thing.

Fallout doesn't have a proper goal, aside from roleplaying in a post-apocalyptic world. The game was messy and buggy, but it was fun. Because of this lack of goals, making a sequel for it was extremely difficult once they switched designers.

And then, there's Empire Earth. This game started off a jumbled mess, with crazy AI, and more features than any other game at the time. As it grew on, it applied more and more game design and marketing principles to it. And failed horribly at the third try. Had it given itself a direction, it would've known what to do.


What's your point?
Good games don't need a goal. They have one, in the designer's head. The game designer was like a sculptor who can see a statue from a block of marble... no need for mortal science. But the bad games would've been better off with a goal.

Keeping a design in your head is good, as long as you keep working on it. If for some reason, the game designer forgets that goal (like I did with Trap Maker), it'll take some effort to regain it. And if the game goes to another designer, without goals, you need some work to understand what it was about.

For new guys like us, who haven't yet created a masterpiece and don't know what it feels like to make one, I'd suggest that the first thing you do when writing down your game is to set down some goals.


Setting down goals
This should be the first thing you do when you have a new idea for a game.

What does the player do?
What makes the game fun?

That should set down your goals. Possible answers include, but aren't limited to:
- Getting better at it (skill/level up)
- Story/character interaction
- Uncovering new things
- Socializing with others
- Acting out a fantasy

In many cases, you won't be able out what makes it fun. It's just fun! So, a better way to go at it is.. what makes the game not fun? E.g:
- Grinding (repeating the same actions to gain xp or money)
- Losing from randomness
- Having to go through boring stuff in a level

These are normally minor goals, because they may interfere with bigger goals. For example, a lot of MMORPGs and RPGs insist that grinding is the only way to get better at the game. But anything that reduces unnecessary grind is seen as a good thing.



Sample designed game
It wouldn't be a Muz article if it was this short. So to pad it up, let's put together a game to show how this works

Pay attention to the little thought processes and how the goals help you get ideas...

Let's make a game about dreams. You are in a dream. You can do whatever your want. Someone you dream about is also able to go in your dream. That's not much of a game yet.

To make it more fun, we can have a little interaction and conflict. Let's assume this is an online multiplayer game. You can enter people's dreams and steal their creativity. With more creativity, you can then be more powerful and do better things.

The player can use their creativity to do nice things, like start a little garden of their dreams, complete with cute pets and all. Or they can use it to throw fireballs in other people's dreams. The most creative can turn a beautiful dream into a nightmare.

We assume there's two types of players.. the ones who want to make a nice dream/chat room and the destructive types who have a lot of fun destroying other people's dreams. And maybe a few in between.

Major goals:
- Being able to play without conflict
- No griefing
- Allowing others to play only by conflict

Minor goals:
- Gaining Creativity gives you a feeling of accomplishment
- New players shouldn't be intimidated
- Old players shouldn't feel ignored

After setting down these goals, then we put features that support them. Don't put features for the sake of putting features. That's a lot of wasted effort and if a feature doesn't fit, it's not very fun. Your features should have a little direction to them.

Conflict play
Well, there's no fun if the destroyers can only destroy the dreams of other destroyers. There's some fun in tearing down a beautiful dream. Well, let's let them run loose with it. Friendly rivalry can be fun. Creative fighters can turn their bodies into weapons, turn into sand and water, shoot lasers from their eyes, make shadowy creatures pop up and attack everyone, etc. This is the easy part; just don't forget about the others.

Non-conflict play
We want some players to be able to play peacefully.. but we want them to go and gather Creativity. We can't force them to fight others. Let's let them gather Creativity slowly but peacefully. One feature we could add is that the more people who visit their dream, and the longer they stay, the more Creativity they get. You should also be able to trade your Creativity with your friends, so you get more from having many friends.

No griefing
We don't want to scare away the peaceful players because of griefers. One obvious option is to have a saving system that lets you save your dream when it gets attacked. And it can be rebuilt at a very low cost.

Have a limit on the number of times someone can get attacked in a week. Another option would be to assign bodyguards.. portals to a more beautiful dream might have to go through the bodyguard. So, someone who wants to attack the nice person's dream would have to beat a bodyguard first. The bodyguard also gets the bonus Creativity from traffic.. so the fighter types with friends will have more power.

Accomplishment and new/oldbies
This is the tough part. We don't want the newbies to feel like they can't accomplish anything because the oldbies have too many points, nor do we want the oldbies to feel like they haven't accomplished anything because everyone gets the same amount of points.

A fix would be to reset all dreams every month or so, but let the oldbies keep their old settings. The oldbies will still have to regain Creativity, but they no longer have to redesign their dreams from scratch. We can also let people unlock Achievements, which lets the old players brag about things that are hard to achieve, like maxing out their Creativity or surviving several sieges in a row.

Features
So, there you go, we have our features list:
- Visiting dreams
- Attacks and defenses (a lot of them)
- Decorations (also a lot)
- Friends are a bonus
- Saving
- Dream guards
- Achievements
- Monthly reset

It took me only 20 minutes to design. And it even anticipates a lot of possible fun and problems and fixes to them.