Practical Game Design

Layering details

When you write about something, you should always use a top-down approach to layering complexity. The first layer should already give a good general idea of what you’re talking about, and successive layers should go deeper into details.

Think about how journalists write articles for newspapers. When reading an article, you can generally always get the gist of the story by reading the headline, then the first sentence will back it up and give some explanation. The rest of the article will provide all the details needed.