Practical Game Design

Elegance in game design

One of the most important principles of good game design is elegance. We are going to talk about elegance in game design throughout the whole book, and it is a concept that hopefully you're going to assimilate in every chapter. In your game designer career, you are going to hear it all the time: we need an elegant solution for this, look at how elegant this tutorial is, such elegance in this feature design. What are they talking about?

If you look at the meaning of the word elegance, two keywords are widely used to explain what it is: efficiency and simplicity.

Games are extremely complex systems, so elegance in design is not a luxury, as the word might suggest, but a strict requirement. Elegant design means features ...