Playing thousands of games doesn't make you a gameplay designer - and that delusion is killing your projects.

Look, I get it. You've played every major release out there and spent countless hours analyzing mechanics, following those "expert's" tutorial that promises to reveal the secrets of great gameplay.

You're convinced that if you just replicate enough cool features, your game will magically come alive.

Here's the brutal truth: while you're stuck copying surface-level gameplay features, you're completely blind to the hidden structure that actually makes great games tick.

Let me show you how gameplay design works at its core - from understanding behaviors and interactions to building coherent systems and, most importantly, why every element must serve your target game experience.

Once you understand this, you'll never look at games the same again.

Gameplay Is Always The Baseline Of Every Game (Even Walking-Simulators)

Gameplay is the most important thing in your game.

I'm sure you're not surprised by this statement (at least you shouldn't be if you buzzed around in game dev forums and developers' interviews) since it's a pretty widespread concept in the game industry.

The reason is obvious: gameplay defines games, so it makes sense to focus on that when you design.

I cannot object to that. That's 100% true.

However, I'm concerned about the concrete application of this concept by the average game designer.

The most popular one is that a game must primarily be about gameplay activities with little to no narrative elements, no themes to talk about, no space for dialogues… nothing, just pure gameplay.

I could understand if you're making an '80s and '90s game remake or nostalgic tribute. Yet, it's not what the "gameplay is the most important thing" statement means.

The fact that gameplay needs to be your focus never implied that other elements can be done poorly, but most importantly, it never implied the quantity of gameplay your game needs to have.

You can design a simple game with just a few gameplay elements, but if everything is in the right place, you'll have a small masterpiece.

That's where narrative-based games come in.

I don't care (and you should neither) about how many "gameplay hours" there are in your game, but instead, how you use them to generate the Target Game Experience you have in mind. Remember, the Player Experience is always what matters.

Take, for example, games like

• Firewatch
• Kentucky Route Zero
• The Stillness of the Wind (unknown hidden gem)
• What Remains of Edith Finch

They, among many others, have a tiny gameplay structure made of a bunch of simple behaviors.

However, what matters is the experience that the gameplay structure delivers to you.

They don't need a bloated and complex set of actions; on the contrary, they would probably be detrimental to their target experience.

"Okay, but then the most important thing is the player experience, not the gameplay, right?"

Yes and no. Here's the trick, let me explain.

From an overall game design point of view, the player experience (defined by your Game Direction) is your lighthouse guide. Without it, you can't have a game design process different from random trial-and-error.

But, when it comes to a game as a concrete set of rules and components, gameplay is king. But it is not at the expense of other things, precisely because everything always exists and is only relative to the player experience.

Other elements, like the level layout, user interface, art, sound, narrative, etc., must be linked to the gameplay structure to enhance the target game experience.

You see, you're not putting them aside. They are crucial in generating the player experience since gameplay can't do everything alone.

Gameplay always lies at the baseline of every game because it represents the structure the player interacts with during play. And guess what comes out of that interaction?

Exactly! The player experience.

That's why you adjust the complexity and length of your gameplay relatively to what kind of target game experience you have, and not the other way around.

That's exactly the core of gameplay design as a discipline.

It's a skill that has to do with crafting the complex structure of behaviors and interactions that is the core of your game. Everything that can happen and all its consequences in a game is part of gameplay.

Let me stress it a bit more because it's precisely where most aspiring game designers get lost.

Gameplay design is not about balancing the game systems, but it's about designing them in the first place by defining their components and structure.

If your game has a combat system, doing gameplay design means iterating on what the player can do and how enemies (or even the environment) react in response to those behaviors. And most importantly, all the strategies that the player can use to achieve the game goals.

By doing this, you create an intricate structure of elements (more or less complex, it doesn't matter) representing the building blocks from where everything grows.

This whole matrix of elements and interactions will mostly be invisible to the player but will influence every bit of his experience.

A player knows what gameplay is, but he will never be able to pinpoint every single element that generated the game experience.

It's like a coral reef. Everyone roughly knows what it is, yet little to none knows that, while occupying only 1% of ocean floors, it's responsible for more than a quarter of marine life on planet Earth.

Gameplay is exactly like that.

A hidden and silent structure shaping an entire ecosystem because it works at the core of it.

Designing gameplay is often mistaken for programming or balancing, but it has nothing to do with them.

When you write code, you already know your gameplay structure and implement it by concretely creating something playable (that you need to test). In the same way, balancing means tweaking your game systems to enhance your target game experience (this is called System Design).

To do both things, you need to design the gameplay systems first. That's what designing gameplay means at its core.

So, what's the difference between game design and gameplay design?

Simple. Gameplay design is just one of the 6 branches of game design alongside

• Level Design
• System Design
• Narrative Design
• UI Design
• UX Design

So, designing gameplay is just a piece of a much bigger puzzle where every game design branch has its role.

Nonetheless, gameplay design is always where it all starts since every other branch needs its building blocks to operate properly.

A level designer cannot create environment layouts and place things in the correct spot without knowing the use the player needs to make of that space. Put simply, whether the player can jump is mandatory information because the level layout will be completely different.

A system designer needs to have all the cause-and-effect relationships of all behaviors possible in the game to tune all the systems' progression and balance.

A narrative designer needs to know what the characters are capable of and what environmental interactions are needed to create a suitable story and setting.

A UI and UX designer needs to understand what happens in any kind of player (and nonplayer) interaction to provide feedback and show the proper information on the screen.

Your game project doesn't necessarily need to start with a gameplay idea.

At some point, though, you need to have those building blocks in place. Otherwise, you'll end up reworking things you've defined because of fundamental changes at the game's root.

And that root is ALWAYS gameplay.

Keep in mind that the game design process is never an assembly line.

You can't move it step by step with a linear motion like designing the gameplay, building the level, writing the narrative, balancing, polishing, and shipping the game. Done.

It doesn't work that way.

It's an iterative process where gameplay design is just one piece of the puzzle that gets continuously iterated along with other design elements to define the game's final form.

The 2 Critical Key Elements Of Every Gameplay System

Gameplay is a complex structure.

Even in apparently simple and small games, the systems need to be defined and laid out to shape the target experience.

Be careful! I'm not talking about implementation here.

The hard part is not writing code on Unity/Unreal (which is just a necessary thing you need to do for then testing) but actually designing the structure at the core of your experience.

You can't do that superficially, stating something like, "In my game, the player runs and jumps around", "kills enemies," and "collects powerups". These are just random ideas anyone can have.

What matters are details and that's where a gameplay designer really comes out.

Among many other things you need to learn and skills you need to improve, I can give a simple structure you can use to start to break down your gameplay ideas.

You just need to identify the 2 critical elements of gameplay:

• Behaviors
• Interactions

A Behavior is simply an action that a game element does in the game. It's a verb representing an atomical action.

For instance, "Killing enemies" is not a behavior because it's a complex outcome that involves more than one game element at once.

"Attacking" and "Colliding" are generally the two most common behaviors of a combat system that can generate an outcome called "killing enemies" (if the enemy's hp gets to 0, of course).

And this is where the second critical element of gameplay comes in.

An interaction happens when 2 or more Behaviors are executed simultaneously, generating one or more effects.

That's it.

What you need to do now is list all the Behaviors and their Interactions (along with their effects) for every gameplay feature you have in mind.

Before jumping into it, though, you must remember one thing that gets often overlooked by aspiring game designers and makes them fail miserably.

Gameplay is NOT only what the player does.

Stuck this into your mind and never get it out. Gameplay is a set of structured systems, and the player always interacts with it from the outside.

Make a tattoo out of it because none will tell you that out of here, and it will change the way you think about gameplay forever.

A gameplay element is every game element (basically any object) that can execute at least one behavior. So, even a simple rock can be a gameplay element if, for example, something happens when a character collides with it.

You see? The player (the Avatar, I should say to be correct) is just one element, and if you ignore the others, your gameplay structure will suffer, and so will your game experience.

This blindness is dangerous. It's just what I call the Player Myopia in action, where you see everything only from the player's perspective.

It means that you're mistaking playing a game for designing it.

The result?

• You're blind to your game's foundational elements.
• Your prototypes are chaotic and confusing, making it hard to understand your core experience.
• You replicate visible gameplay elements of other games without understanding their purpose.

So make sure you remember to go further from the player's perspective when listing your game's Behaviors and Interactions.

But wait, I can already hear the objections.

"This doesn't work for my game! I'm not making some action game, I'm working on a [random game genre]".

Don't worry, I get this reaction all the time, and I love it. Because it gives me the chance to prove how these 2 concepts apply to any type of game.

You see, Behaviors and Interactions are genre-agnostic because they describe the anatomy of gameplay as a system regardless of the type of game.

Whether you're making an action game, a card game, or even a visual novel, you can break down every relevant gameplay into these 2 elements.

Let's take a card game, for example. What are the behaviors?

Each card might have its own unique behavior: dealing damage, healing units, summoning creatures, buffing stats, freezing enemies. These are all behaviors.

When a buff card enhances a creature card on the field, or a damage spell hits a defensive unit?

Those are interactions generating effects.

This is why card games are perfect examples of behavior-interaction systems.

Each card is essentially a carrier of specific behaviors that can interact with other cards' behaviors in countless ways.

So, this is not about the genre; it's about breaking down complex systems into their fundamental building blocks. This is one of the biggest and most requested skills from game companies that they apparently have a hard time finding.

This means if you have it, you gain an important edge over everyone else.

Of course, I'm just scratching the surface here.

A full gameplay structure is more complex than that with more nuances. Yet, those 2 are the most basic and crucial elements, and even with just them, you can break down any kind of gameplay idea to understand its deep anatomy.

Think of Behaviors and Interactions as the coral polyps of gameplay.

They're the tiny fundamental organisms that build entire reef systems. Sure, a complete coral reef needs countless other elements to thrive:

• The right water temperature
• Specific nutrients
• Various fish species
• Complex ecological relationships

But without those basic coral polyps creating the structural foundation, none of those higher-level systems would have a place to exist.

Now, if you want to deeply understand gameplay design, you need another crucial piece of the puzzle.

Gameplay Design Is Never Done In A Vacuum

Gameplay is about structuring the interactive layer, but the structure itself is never enough.

A Behavior, an Interaction, or a specific effect is never there just because it looks cool or seems "fun". Every element must serve a clear purpose to generate your target game experience.

This is where many aspiring game designers get it wrong.

They add gameplay features because "It's what games in this genre do" or because "they're cool", completely missing the opportunity to reinforce their game's deeper meaning through gameplay (the most powerful thing a game can do).

That's a recipe for a confused, directionless game.

Let me tell you why this mindset is killing your design process.

You see, great authors and professional game designers work with what I often call a "necessity mindset". Every element they add has a crystal clear purpose in generating their target game experience. They add it because they need it for a specific experiential reason.

Think about it.

When Journey lets you briefly float and glide, it's not just about vertical mobility. Look deeper.

Those behaviors aren't there because the designers thought flying would be cool. Every aspect of your movement - the graceful floating, the elegant gliding - serves the game's core purpose of creating a meditative, peaceful experience of connection and companionship.

Of course, you need more than one meaningful connection, but if you have this approach to all the gameplay features you add to your game, the whole thing starts to get real.

Again, look at "Papers, Please". The repetitive checking of documents and stamping of papers might seem like boring gameplay on the surface. But that's exactly the point!

Those mechanical interactions aren't random. They're carefully crafted to make you feel the weight of bureaucracy and the moral burden of your choices in an authoritarian regime.

"But what about more traditional games?" I hear you asking.

Take Dark Souls' bonfire. They're not just there because "games need checkpoints".

The behavior of lighting them, their spacing in the world, how they reset everything - these choices serve the game's fundamental purpose of creating an experience about persistence and cycles.

I think you get the idea.

This is what separates the top 1% of game designers from everyone else.

They never add features because they can. Every behavior and every interaction has earned its place by contributing to the target game experience.

Before adding a new behavior or interaction, you need to answer:

• How does this serve my target game experience?
• What specific purpose does it fulfill?
• How does it work with other elements to create meaning?

If you can't answer these questions, you're falling into the trial-and-error trap I warned you about earlier.

"All good, but how do I know these things to make the right gameplay design decisions?"

Great question. This is where the Game Direction comes into play.

Think of Game Direction as your compass in game design. It's not some fancy corporate document - it's simply a clear definition of what experience you want to create with your game.

Yet, bear in mind. I'm not talking about vague stuff like "I want it to be fun" or "It should have fast pace combat". It's called target game EXPERIENCE for a reason, and it has nothing to do with game content.

That's why the Game Direction must be your first step.

Not prototyping.

Not choosing an engine.

Not writing lore.

Why?

Because without it, everything that follows is just random shots in the dark.

And I'll go even further than that. You can't actually state if a gameplay feature is good or bad for your game if you don't have a Game Direction in place. It should be obvious since you have nothing on which to base your judgment.

Let me bust another dangerous myth right away.

"Game Direction is just for big studios with massive teams and budgets."

Wrong. Dead wrong.

And from that mindset, guess what aspiring game designers pick up?

Exactly - they skip the Game Direction entirely and jump straight into gameplay design.

Look, I get it. You're excited about your gameplay ideas and what to start prototyping right away. Trust me, I've been there.

But here's how things are: without a Game Direction, you're throwing stuff to the wall, hoping they stick.

It feels fast and satisfying at the start because you're progressing, but that's just all an illusion because when you're game falls apart (because it lacks the coherence a Game Direction gives you), you'll be back to the beginning.

Yet, with a lot of time wasted on your shoulders.

"Ok, but what exactly is a Game Direction?"

It's your target game experience spelled out in crystal clear terms:

• The sensations you want players to feel
• The emotions you want to trigger
• The meanings you want to convey

Crafting a good Game Direction is a skill you need to learn as a game designer.

And it's one of the most important ones if you want to build great gameplay. I don't care what other gurus are telling you; all gameplay decisions start from a clear and well-rounded Game Direction.

"But can't I figure that out as I go along?"

Let me answer with a question: Would you start building a house without knowing what kind of house you want to build?

Of course not! Yet that's exactly what you do when you dive into gameplay design without a Game Direction.

You see, this is where the trial-and-error trap shows its ugly face again. You start adding features because they "feel right" or because "other games have them".

The result? A confused mess of gameplay elements that don't work together toward any clear purpose.

Take a step back. Before you even think about gameplay structure and all those exciting things, sit down and define your target experience.

Without it, you're just guessing. And guessing is not game design.

So please, do yourself a favor. Before you open Unity, Unreal, or whatever tool you use, get clear about the experience you want to design.

Your future self will thank you.

Designing Gameplay Means Shaping The Player’s Mental Structure

By now, you understand that gameplay is more than just a collection of random features.

We've talked about behaviors, interactions, and how they form the structural foundation of your game - like those coral polyps building an entire reef.

But there's something even deeper I need to tell you.

Something that will completely change how you think about gameplay design forever.

You see, in all our discussions about systems and structures, we haven't yet touched on the most crucial aspect of gameplay design. The one thing that separates mindless feature implementation from meaningful design.

Remember when I told you that great authors and professional game designers work with a "necessity mindset"? That every element needs a clear purpose in generating the target game experience?

Well, here's where the concept reaches its deepest meaning.

I see this all the time when talking with aspiring game designers. They focus entirely on building gameplay structures - the behaviors and interactions we discussed in the previous chapter. And yes, that's important. But it's not the whole story.

See, something critical separates top-tier game designers from everyone else. Something that completely changes how you should think about gameplay design.

The game you see on the screen? That's not actually where the game happens.

I know, I know. This sounds crazy, especially after all we've covered about gameplay structures.

But stay with me because this will change everything about how you look at games from now on.

If you feel to strongly disagree with this statement, it's ok. After all, you can see and touch your gameplay systems right there on the screen.

But trust me, you're missing something fundamental.

Here's the thing that best game designers understand (sometimes without even realizing it): the actual game happens all in the player's brain.

Everything we've discussed so far - every behavior, every interaction, every system - they're just tools.

But tools for what?

That's where it gets fascinating and where the real essence of gameplay design gets revealed.

Your real job as a gameplay designer doesn't just stop at building those structures we talked about. That's just the operational stuff - important, for sure, but not the ultimate goal.

Your actual purpose is to shape how players think and process the experience. Everything you add to the gameplay of your game should be there to guide the player's strategic thinking in specific directions.

Remember what we've said about having a clear purpose? This is what that purpose ultimately serves - crafting specific thought patterns that lead to your target game experience you've defined in the Game Direction.

This is not just something to stupidly overcomplicate things.

Great game designers don't follow; they lead. They understand that their systems are means to an end - tools to shape the player's mental processes in service of a clear target experience they've carefully crafted for them.

If you want to become a great game designer, you can't keep fooling yourself with superficial approaches and quick fixes.

Let's be honest. You've been chasing shortcuts, haven't you?

Following those "expert tutorials", copying successful games, and desperately trying to make your game "fun" without understanding why and how.

Think about it.

You've probably nodded along to everything we've discussed so far, but deep down, you're still planning to jump straight into Unity or Unreal the moment you finish reading this.

You're convincing yourself that you just need to practice more and that making more prototypes will somehow magically transform you into a professional game designer.

But here's the uncomfortable truth: you're just collecting a dubious set of situational "tips" while completely missing the foundational thinking process that actually separates kick-ass game designers from hobbyists.

Do you want to step up to the next level? Stop fooling yourself with superficial approaches to gameplay design.

Look, I get it. When you see successful games, it's natural to focus on what you see on the screen and try replicating them. We've all been there, desperately trying to piece together gameplay elements that seem to work in other titles.

While that's a natural starting point, what you're doing next is hurting your growth as a designer.

Every day you spend copying surface-level gameplay features is another day you're missing the deeper structural purpose behind them.

Your gameplay systems are just hollow imitations - collections of behaviors and interactions without any clear purpose or cohesive direction.

Think about all those prototypes where you simply threw features because they "felt right".

Each one represents hours spent implementing gameplay elements without understanding how they work together as a system.

You're not designing gameplay - you're just assembling pieces from other games without grasping why they worked in their original context.

And deep down, you know this approach isn't working. I'm sure of it.

Now the choice is yours.

You can keep following the same path that led you nowhere, or you can start taking gameplay design seriously.

With the right mindset and approach, you can finally start creating the meaningful gameplay experiences you've always dreamed of.