I bet you would love to make your game design idea more innovative.

I also bet you don't know how to do it without banging your head on your desk, thinking for days and days on end. Designing something different could be exciting and frustrating at the same time.

You tell yourself, "I want to do something never done before!". However, as soon as you finish the sentence, your brain seems to disconnect from the world and enter a huge void full of nothing. Only sometimes you encounter some ideas, but they smell of "already seen".

The reason is you lack a precise method.

That's why in this post, I'll give you 2 little-known techniques for innovating in game design that you can master to become a top mind in game design without having 20 years of experience.

What Everybody Gets Wrong About Game Innovation And How To Get It Right

What does it mean to innovate?

When you open the gates with a question, everybody gets in with an answer. So many people have opinions about it, and I'm sure you have yours too.

Like many terms we use daily, "innovation" is challenging to strictly define. The reason is simple: it's 100% subjective. It's a product of our perception based on how much we know about something. People have different levels (sometimes even drastically) of perceived innovation depending on many variables.

We as individuals always have a limited view of the world around us, and when we see something we know nothing about, it surprises us. That's innovation.

Despite individual differences being untrackable, the "level of gaming experience" matters.

This marks the difference between "casual gamers" and "passionate gamers". I don't like to use the term "hardcore" since it's generally associated with difficulty leading to stupid discussions (often around Dark Souls & friends).

The key metric I use to differentiate between casual and passionate is "game medium knowledge". And that's what directly impacts the perceived innovation. A casual gamer plays just to have fun and pass (or waste?) time, so many designs could seem innovative when, on a global scale, they're not. A passionate gamer is the opposite since he's interested in how the game medium works and not just playing for the sake of it.

That's why passionate gamers are often more demanding.

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Innovation is not creating something new in the sense of being 100% unique.

The source of innovation is creativity, and you can’t ever create something out of nothing. Creativity is always a combinatorial act.

When designing, your focus should be on perceived innovation on a global scale since you can’t track individual perceptions. Otherwise, you can design a clone and hope it will be played only by players who don’t know it’s a clone (in the Internet Era). Good luck! If it seems too ambitious of scope, it’s because you don’t have the details. The easy part is understanding how to do it; in fact, that’s exactly what I’m going to tell you in this blog post.

The struggle is always to pull it off. That’s why everyone can innovate, but not everyone actually does it.

Innovation in games means a new kind of Player Experience.

Of course, since we’re always talking about perceptions, it means you need to design an experience significantly different from others available. You need to make it recognizable as easily as possible. If you know the Theory of Player Experience, you already know that you can’t ever shape the Player Experience directly. So, the secret of innovation in game design lies in your Game Direction.

If you don’t know what I’m talking about, that’s bad, but here is a quick refresher.

The Game Direction is the most critical aspect of game design. Without it, your decision-making process falls like a house of cards, and you find yourself groping in the dark without a goal.

Whenever you have no clue whether something is good or not for your game and you find yourself throwing a dice to choose, you have a severe problem. Having a Game Direction is the solution to it. It defines the details of the Target Game Experience you want your game to generate for the player. It’s your lighting guide in the design process to prevent you from moving on with “intuitions” and gut feelings.

So, if you don’t have it, you have work to do.

Now, let’s get back to innovation.

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Some people claim: "You don't need always to be innovative".

Forget it. What's the point of creating a game clone?

It's a creative dead-end, offering nothing fresh or exciting to the market, making your game blend into the sea of forgettable clones. Your game will taste like something already seen, and it's doomed into insignificance. It will not be a good portfolio entry either! From a game design perspective, replicating something is lazy since others have solved all the issues; you just copied.

Yet, hold on!

This doesn't mean you need to design something 100% different from everything else in every aspect. That would be an absurd perfectionist move that will spawn a wall in front of you too high to go through. As we'll see, a good chunk of innovation has to do with taking inspiration from things that already exist out there.

"But wait, you're telling me that every time I design, I always have to strive for innovation?"

The short answer is "hell yeah." But let me be precise because there's a moment when you can actually ignore it: at the start of your game design journey.

When learning game design, you need to focus on acquiring the basic principles, understanding how games work, and managing the design process. You don't need to innovate at this stage since your focus is not to launch a game or something. Focus 100% on learning. Other than that, new game experiences should always be your priority.

But how do you do it then?

For some people, the first requirement that comes to mind is "having experience". However, there's absolutely zero correlation between high-level working experience and innovation.

The industry is full of plenty of veteran designers; if that were so, innovators would flood the market. Instead, indie games are often the most linked with innovation despite having less design experience. The truth is that you just need your functional brain and a process. Unfortunately, I can't help with the brain part since trading organs is illegal, but I can surely do something about the process.

There are 2 effective ways to innovate in game design:

• Through the game's rules
• Through the game's meaning

Why?

Rules are the core of every game, so you're innovating the most significant elements that ripple through everything else. Meaning is the core of the Player Experience and the game's purpose, so everything will change according to it.

But let's look at both techniques in detail.

Technique #1: Innovating Through The Game’s Rules

Rules are the core of every game and define its “essence”.

They’re the components of gameplay design and differentiate a game from every other kind of media. The basic mistake beginners make when it comes to gameplay is only focusing on what the player does. The player’s actions in the game are just one aspect of the game structure.

Yet, there’s much more in gameplay design, including:

• Other characters’ actions out of the player’s control
• The interactable elements of the environment
• All the interactions between these elements that generate emergent effects

Leaving out these crucial elements makes you see the game as a player and miss the fundamental pieces.

With this Player Myopia, if you manage somehow to continue with the design process, you’ll do it by trial and error, and the game will be out of your control. However, most of the time, beginners get stuck even before since they don’t know what to do.

They have an idea, and they can’t properly structure the gameplay. But what does this have to do with innovation?

Innovation through rules always starts from understanding the details of game systems.

In fact, game systems (as sets of rules) are the source of this type of innovation. You can’t design a new combat system without studying in detail how many other combat systems work.

An analytical understanding of game systems is mandatory. Analyzing game systems (regardless of innovation purposes) should be a routine walk in the park for you. Unfortunately, just too few game designers actually and effectively do it.

Oh, you thought innovating through game rules was simply mixing two genres?

That’s the cheap version, for sure! Mario Kart meets Dark Souls, what a great idea…

We could open an entire post about the dangers of using genres in the game design process, but we have no time for it now. Let me say that mixing existing genre tropes in a patchwork game that barely stands up is not a great idea. You design by sticking random pieces together without knowing what you’re doing. By just picking the genre (which is a big category with a fuzzy definition), you can’t see where and why it breaks.

And I’ll catch it before it pops into your mind: “Studying a genre” doesn’t make sense. Do yourself a favor and study individual game systems instead.

So what does it mean, in practice, to innovate through game rules?

As we’ve said before, you start by deeply analyzing existing games at an anatomical level. Here’s the crucial part.

You don’t need to “review the game” or analyze it entirely. Pick the game system you want to innovate (or learn more about) and turn yourself into a human scanner.

You need to understand:

• What are its foundational elements, and how do they work
• What emergent behaviors it generates
• How does the game context influence its behaviors
• How does it communicate with other game systems

Remember, you don’t need to judge the game; you need to understand how it works.

Every game will have at least a slightly different take on the same kind of system. The more different types you analyze, the more you’ll gain an understanding of them and increase your chance of innovating them.

Have a bias toward analyzing old games.

This doesn’t mean you need to ignore new games, of course. Older games have been “chewed up” by the culture simply because they have been around longer. Seek games that innovated in the past and analyze them.

Search for:

• The Legend of Zelda
• Doom
• Devil May Cry
• Half-Life 2
• Portal
• Dark Souls

I’m sure you have many more in mind.

Remember, don’t copy what they did; it won’t work the same for you. Focus on analyzing how they work in detail.

The core of the struggle for this kind of innovation involves being the first.

When you design a new system or significantly change an existing one, you must deal with new emergent effects. The problem is no one ever saw them before you, so you can’t know them in advance.

You’re the first to experience those system behaviors; the harder you innovate, the more true this gets. On the other hand, you have an edge over everybody since this is the hardest type of innovation, but it’s 100% the most powerful. That’s why my advice, here more than ever, is to keep the game small. Small doesn’t necessarily mean simple, though.

If you believe it, it’s because you can’t effectively analyze game systems at an anatomical level and can’t shape their inner complexity. That’s the crucial skill of any kick-ass Analytical Game Designer.

Now, let’s move on to the second powerful technique, which has a great impact with a lower difficulty barrier.

Technique #2: Innovating Through The Game’s Meaning

When you choose to design a game, you must have a reason to do it.

You need to have something you want to communicate to the player. Why? That's easy because that's why art exists in the first place, games included. You want to provide the player with something to think about, something to interpret that will shape his personal game experience.

I know, most games out there have no meaningful purpose.

What's the purpose of League of Legends, Assassin's Creed, Overwatch, Fortnite, etc.? They just want the player to play for the sake of playing (aka have fun).

They lack a meaning the player can build by experiencing the game and investigating, like a detective, where the game wants to take him.

Meaningful games instead hold deep experiences:

• Metal Gear Solid
• Papers Please
• Kentucky Route Zero
• Shadow of the Colossus
• Silent Hills 2
• Etc.

If you played some of these, I bet your heart rate increased at least a bit.

Many players still remember them today, and they will probably continue to do so in the future. Contrary to the games I mentioned previously, these are culturally relevant beyond public events and campaigns.

Leveraging meaning is the most underrated way of innovating.

Nowadays, it's done mainly by indie games, and in the Triple-A mainstream market, it's pretty much nonexistent, aside from a few established game authors. Indies often can do it because they are small studios with no big investors that tell them what games to make. Game authors are great exceptions that have reached enough authority to dictate what to do and whatnot. In both cases, it's, as always, a matter of gaining freedom in some way or another.

No freedom = no innovation. Unfortunately, this is the first reason why this way of innovating is not so common.

The second reason also tells you the main source of innovation through meaning: culture.

I know for some, this can be pretty unpopular these days, but you need to study. To build meaning, you need something interesting to say about a topic.

All great artists in any medium are also great learners who know a ton (and are passionate) about a theme and leverage the medium itself to communicate a vision. Let me put it mildly. If you're ignorant, you can't be a Game Designer because you won't have anything interesting to say.

People are interested in new perspectives that will make them view the world with a different pair of eyes. Yet, to give the player that new pair of eyes with your game experience, you need to know what you're talking about.

This way is easier than innovating through rules, but it's not easy at all.

Many beginner game designers want to design meaningful games that have an impact. And if you're one of them, that's a great goal.

However, you can't just choose a topic you like and slap it on top of your favorite game genre. I've seen so many teams fail and get frustrated because their chosen theme became an obstacle to the design process. They never worried about deepening the theme and understanding more about their initial idea.

This initial lack backfired in the long run, crushing everything into the ground. They ended up losing trust in themselves and feeling bad about the time they had lost by blindly moving on without thinking and getting caught up in the excitement.

That's why the magic word for innovating through meaning is coherence.

The core of the struggle of this innovation type is not just knowing about the theme. This is the easiest part since your passion for the topic mostly drives it.

Integrating the gameplay with the theme you chose to discuss is harder. They need to be meaningfully coherent with each other. You need to make the player feel the connection between what he does in the game and the message you want to communicate by leveraging the game context. Read the sentence again, carefully.

This is extremely important (and rarely spoken); otherwise, your meaning will lose effectiveness. That's the key power of games, and not leveraging it's criminal.

Now, can you do even more?

Can you design a game that will stand the test of time and deliver a memorable experience the player will never forget?

How To Design A Game Masterpiece

Is it a good idea to combine the two techniques?

Yes, it is indeed! You've probably already thought about it, haven't you?

By doing it, you design a new type of experience generated in a new way. And that's awesome since these types of works of art tend to stand the test of time. They advance how things are done (often setting new standards) and give a thoughtful and profound perspective on a theme. Time applies a sort of "Darwinian selection process" that tends to keep alive works that explore interesting things in multifaceted ways.

The main reason is that these works are "food" for passionate people who keep talking about them for a long time. This seems too good to be true, so where's the catch, then?

Honestly, there's no real catch; it's just really hard to pull off.

You need unbelievable knowledge of game systems and a great cultural background. It's certainly not impossible, but it's pretty hard and generally something out of scope at the start of your career.

Game designers (often Game Directors with their game studio) pursue this goal after becoming experts. It's not necessarily about having game design experience. It just takes a lot of time to build a strong cultural background to design something like this. The inherent difficulty of combining these 2 techniques is more than the sum of the two.

This difficulty, though, is what makes pursuing this kind of achievement an incredibly satisfying endeavor. However, don't dream too much and always remember an important fact.

Innovation never implies success.

Let me be clear. With the term "success" here, I'm talking about both the subjective success you define for yourself and the market success.

You're not guaranteed to make a masterpiece, nor can you plan it. This is true even for established game authors, who struggle as much as anyone to produce such high-quality work. None has the formula to make a good game (and none will ever do) because there's no formula. Whoever says otherwise doesn't know what he's talking about, or it's tricking you to gain something from you.

Success doesn't depend solely on you, even the type you define for yourself. You can only pursue a statistical improvement in succeeding.

That's why I rage when I hear things like "Start with your game genre".

Genres are not "good game formulas" you can follow and guarantee to make something good. They are not even, as some people want to imply, "stable game system configurations". They're far from stable! They are groupings created by the audience that are constantly changing. In other words, they're not game design stuff.

If you believe you only need to pick a game genre, follow its "rules", and add some personal flavor, you're fooling yourself. Are you sure game design is that easy?

Yet, I'm not blind; I see why many people suggest relying on genres for beginners.

It's a quick and easy way to start. Starting the design process from an established genre provides a clear framework that seems easy to follow.

That's true, but it actually hurts you! I suppose you don't want to just make a game once; you want to learn how to design games, don't you? I'm sure you know there's a big difference. Relying on a genre limits your design process and won't help you learn how to solve design problems. But it gets worse than that!

You keep seeing games like a player, and every time something is a little off from the genre you know, you have no way to analyze it properly. It literally shrinks your mind.

Don't waste time looking for the "magic trick" or the "right genre" to design a game.

Focus on doing what none does and reach the top 1% of professional game designers.

I'm going to give you an unpopular piece of advice. None will tell you this since they want to exploit your hunger for quick and simple solutions; I'll tell you the truth instead.

Study. Yes, I'm telling you to study hard, but most importantly, be curious about everything. Perpetual curiosity is a common trait of pretty much all the great artists and geniuses of human history. You can't innovate (not even a little) if you have nothing to pull interesting things from.

Do yourself a favor and prioritize:

• Studying the fundamentals of gameplay design to actually understand how games work anatomically.
• Learning how to expand a rough idea into a structured gameplay, iterating on issues before they arise.
• Taking inspiration from other media (books, movies, music, comics, etc.) because that's where real innovation lies.

Remember, you're not just a standard game designer; you're an engineer of ideas.

Stop thinking like a player and start designing like a professional.