After defining the theme, making winning and losing conditions, and drawing our general flow diagram, now is the time to create the core part of our game design: game mechanics.
Game mechanics define what the players do inside the main gameplay screen, which is shown in the preceding diagram. This is where the players spend most of their time and have fun in your game, and because of this, it is the most important part of game design.
In LeBlanc's MDA design method, mechanics refers to the individual actions the player can take, such as jumping, shooting, dragging puzzle pieces, picking up objects, placing objects, and more (there are hundreds of game mechanics that can be combined in any number of ways to make the next component, dynamics).
The first step in making game mechanics is to make game rules. Game rules are special rules in your game that might or might not be written in other games. Game rules tell your players what they can or can't do in the game and what the results of their actions are. The following are small examples of game rules along with their game genre:
These rules have been created for the sake of examples; you can write as many or as little game rules as you want. You need to always add at least one rule that's unique to your game to make it different from other games. In the tower-defense example, you can add an element system to add elements to the tower's attacks (such as a fire-based attack or a wind-based attack), and there are enemies who are strong against certain elements. Alternatively, if you only want to make a clone of your favorite game, you could just make slight changes to the existing game mechanics.
This is what happens inside the main gameplay screen in our game-screen flow diagram, from the time the level started until it ended, whether players meet the winning condition or the losing condition. Taking an example from the tower-defense game, the flow will look as follows:
If the level still has any more enemy waves, it returns to the preparation phase; if not, then the player wins.
Depending on what happens to the player during the entire level, certain things can take place:
To create your main game phases, there are a few questions you need to ask yourself regarding the challenges and rewards that you make for your game:
To make it easier to understand, I have a small diagram that shows what the main game phases in general should look like. You can make this diagram more detailed depending on your answer to the questions posed earlier.
Now, we are nearing the completion of our game design, but before we can call it complete, there's one more thing that needs to be covered: the fun factor. This is one of the reasons why people play your game, to have fun. Other reasons are to kill some time or as an escape from the everyday routine. I will describe this feeling of fun into two broad meanings: entertaining fun and challenging fun. A game can use one of the two or combine them in a certain way to create their own experiences.
This definition of fun that the game is trying to give to the players is usually not written as a section or a bullet point in the game design, but it is incorporated in the whole design. It determines the kind of visual the game presents and defines how hard the level is. If the game has dialogues, it will set whether there will be comedic lines or not.
This fun factor is meant to be felt by the players, whether they feel joy, excitement, or maybe, the drama in the narrative of the game. Every game tries to give its own experience to the players.