Why design our game, why not just start developing it? This question spawns from the excitement of developing games, especially with the Unity game engine. All games start with an idea. That idea is translated into a design, and that design is the basis for development and, eventually, the final game.

A game's design is like a blueprint for a house. You would not consider building a house without a blueprint, and it is an equally bad idea to develop a game without designing it first. The reason for this is to save time and frustration. For larger projects, time wasted also means unnecessary funds were expended. Imagine that you employed a project team of twelve developers, animators, and artists. If you shared your game idea, would they have enough to go on? Would they do great things, but not have a cohesive set of components for your game? All we are doing with our game design is documenting as much as we can in the beginning so that the development process is purposeful. Without question, you will continually modify your game's design during development, so having a strong base to start from is critical to your success.

Our game design will serve as the foundation for the look of our game, what the player's objectives are, what the gameplay will be, supporting user actions, animations, audio, artificial intelligence, and victory conditions. That is a lot to think about, and underscores the importance of translating the game idea into a game design.

Throughout the book we will be covering a range of components, however, in this section, we will cover those which are listed beneath:

• Game idea 
• Input controls 
• Winning and losing