Game Pillar
When we want to create a game and we start thinking about how it is going to be designed, the first step we need to take is to establish some parameters that delimit and guide the design and production process. These parameters are known as Game Pillars and, as the name suggests, they are the foundation of a game. As designers, we will work with the Pillars as a filter to know if a mechanic/idea will fit well in our game or, on the contrary, will spoil it.
In conclusion, we can define Game Pillars as a list of 3 to 5 key concepts (such as gameplay and dynamics, emotions/feelings, genre/theme/mechanics or art direction) that we want our game to explore and build upon.
Why we need the Pillars?
Some may wonder why they have to limit their games to 3 or 5 specific things instead of making a super game that does so many amazing things.
The reason is to keep the game consistent. If you try to do everything in one game, players may get lost or you won’t be able to deliver all these elements/emotions on a high level.
The Game Pillars also help the rest of the development team understand what the designer wants to do and express with the game.
Unique Selling Point
It may seem to people that game pillars are basically the same as Unique Selling Points, but they don’t encompass exactly the same things.
A Unique Selling Point (USP) is the essence of what makes your product or service better than the competition, and a pillar is a set of features that will be given special attention during the development of the game.
Obviously, all your Unique Selling Points will be pillars, but a pillar is not necessarily a USP.
Examples
Now that we know what Game Pillars are let’s see some examples:
The Last of Us
- Crafting: along the game, there is a lot of loot that we will be able to get and it to craft useful things like the ammo. So we will be exploring all of the environment in search of materials for craft.
- Story: Last of Us is a game based on narrative. The story that the game tells us is one of the most important things when we play the game.
- AI partners: the game is all about building a relationship between the player’s character with the AI partner Ellie and other partners you meet throughout your journey.
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Stealth: combat is used in this game, but if you were to run and gun, then the game would make your life extremely difficult. So the player is encouraged to play more stealthily.
The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild
- Exploration: the player is encouraged to explore, by being able to go to any area they wish whenever they wish. The information around the map is hidden and is the player who has to explore and discover all the missions and things that he can do over the world.
- Traversal: BotW offers so many modes to move around the world like climbing, swimming, running, paragliding and the interesting shield surfing.
- Scavenging: Players constantly need to go through the world and search for items. From weapons which break after a few battles, to the food players must use to regain health or help them traverse through all kinds of environmental hazards.
- Combat: combat is very important in this game as there are a lot of hostile creatures in the world you have to defeat and a lot of mechanics you have to do it like the parry or the dodge. Also the player can choose a lot of different combat styles depending on the weapon they have equipped like the sword or the spear.
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OPTIONS: in my opinion the most important pillar. This game presents a lot of options to the player from multiple ways and order to complete the story, to solve the puzzles or to kill the enemies. Everything the player can imagine is one more thing to solve the problem he needs, in this game there is no one way to solve the issues.
The Binding of Isaac
- Difficulty: one of the most important thing of the game is the difficulty that this one presents. We will have to be surviving through different rooms with different unknown challenges. Also, we can choose different characters that will increase the difficulty like “The Lost”, a character that starts with no health and cannot gain health by any means. Therefore, it will die from any damage taken.
- Decision making: another pillar is the decisions we have to make in the runs, it will be very important if we take or no an item or if we enter in a specific room or not. These decisions will define how will the game progress
- Randomness(Alea): in this game everything will be randomly generated so we will never know how the game will be.
- Replayability: these types of games are fully based on the replayability, all the games will be always different an you have to be playing the game from zero every time you finish one run to unlock more content.
Lost Ark
- Progression: Lost Ark is an MMORPG so one of the fundamental pillars of the game is the leveling and character progression basic of all the RPG, getting more abilities and skill points that will make our character more powerfull.
- Customization: in the game every player can be whatever he wants. They have character creation, class selection and the skill points, allowing them to build the abilities of their characters in different ways so they get different play styles and appearance even having the same character class.
- Multiplayer(MMO): this is the most important pillar of the game. All the content of the game is based on the people interaction, making you able to play alone or with other people at any time. We can divide this one in 3 other pillars:
- Competition: having a lot of content based on pvp such as the guild wars or the arenas.
- Cooperation: allowing you to play all the content of the game in cooperative with other people.
- Community: these games depends a lot of his community because the game is mostly based on online interaction with other people.
Paradox
Also, there are some studios that have their own’s Game Pillars for all their videogames. Paradox Interactive is an example:
Establishing the Game Pillars
The process of defining a core Game Pillars is not difficult, but we need to have it very clear.
The basics
- Each statement should be short, no more than a sentence.
- It should be phrased as a rule, you will follow through the development.
- Make your pillars focus on the player.
The process
- Choosing a target: the first thing we need is to know in what kind of player will base our game, if we will attack a casual target or a competitive one, if we want to make a game for killers or for achievers. A way to classify the kind of players is using the Bartle taxonomy.
- Brainstorming: doing brainstorming session with all the team is a good way (the best) to start establishing what we want to do with the game. The advantage of this approach is that everyone understands and buys into the chosen pillars because they had a say in creating them. The downside is that this process can take time, with potentially conflicting ideas needing to be whittled down until an agreement is reached.
- Filter the ideas: once we have the ideas on the table, we need to chose the good one’s and discard the bad ones. Actually there are no bad ideas, but we need to choose these ones that are accessible to do it with the resources we have, fit better with our game target and have more synergies between the other chosen ideas.
- Be original: there is an existing game that has ALL your game pillars?
Identifying bad Game Pillars
- A Game Pillar should have one solid answer for How can we do it?
- Pillars must be general things that include all the game: if the pillar is focused on a specific element, we should discard it.
Using the Game Pillars
Once we have defined the Game pillars, as I said in the beginning, we will use them as a filter to know if an idea will spoil the game. We have to ask ourselves:
- Is the idea loyal to one or more of our Game Pillars? Try to not turn aside the original design.
- Is exceeding us with work? We have to be mindful of the time and resources we have.
- Is relevant to the game? Don’t add things that have no real purpose.
- Don’t mess up something that works: try to not change any pillar.
Does this mechanic/idea serve or fit into the pillars of our game? If the answer is ‘No’ then it may be best to remove this mechanic
Summary
In conclusion, Game Pillars are concepts that we define before start making the game. We will have these concepts present in the rest of the game development to help us make accurate decisions and avoiding fails, informing us of the global game design.
Documentation
This page have been mainly based on the Max Pears article: Design Pillars – The Core of Your Game. You can check it out here
More documentation:
The Acagamic - Communication and Game Design Documents
Raspberry Pi - How pillars and triangles can focus your game design
Game Dev Underground - Game Design Document Template – One Page + Super Easy
Technical Game Design - Pillars
Examples of game pillars (reddit post)
Oriol de Dios - Game Design Pillars
Paradox Interactive - Game Pilars
ThursDev: Game Design Pillars - Better design through definition and restriction
About me
This page has been written by David Benages, student of Videogame Design and Development in CITM of UPC. This content is generated for the second year’s subject Project 2.