Why you and your game will benefit from theme driven design
Hello, I'm Johnnemann Nordhagen, a designer and programmer who has worked on games such as the Bioshock series, Gone Home, Where the Water Tastes Like Wine, and Weird West. I am currently a technical narrative designer at Ubisoft Stockholm.
Recently, in recognition of the five-year anniversary of my game, Where the Water Tastes Like Wine, I wrote a short piece about its design and production. In the process of doing that, I found out that a talk I gave several years ago (How to Make Jaws Without A Shark, for Full Indie 2019) no longer exists on the Internet, and I decided to break down the ideas in that talk and the anniversary piece into a broader exploration of what I like to call Thematic Design.
The aim of thematic design is to generate design and narrative pillars for a game. I'm assuming most people are familiar with the concept of pillars, but this is the way I think about them: the point of these principles is to provide something to consult when you need to ask a question about your game's direction, to make a decision on something. They provide a set of values you can check yourself against, or a source of inspiration when you're at a loss. And I think there are a number of reasons a thematic approach is perfect for this role.
I'm treating themes here as the core things you want your work to say or concern itself with. For many people, this is a natural way of approaching the development of video games. For others, it might be a foreign technique. I don't mean here that your work has to have A Message, or be didactic, necessarily. But every work we make as people ends up saying something about the world and our view of it, so you might as well set out to make sure it says something intentional.
There are other
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