#gdc2018

Though this concept relates more to mobile game designers, I feel that this topic is something that all game designers should be familiar with.

First of all creating games with this concept will give you three benefits:

Easier Tutorilasation - creating tutorials will be much easier if most of the game can be understood by just looking at the screen.

Improves Organic Discovery - if everything you need to play the game is on the screen, people will discover things for themselves and be more drawn to play the game when they aren’t told everything from the get-go.

Easier Marketing - screenshots and gifs will need little to no context, drawing more people in and making the game more desirable to play.

Just by making your game more easy to understand, you can improve its marketing value and make it much more appealing to play, making your job as a designer much easier.

As Zach Gage explained in his talk, to make a game where you can understand it in one look, or has he calls it, to make it ‘subway-legible’, you need the Three Reads.

He first explains it with how to create a concert poster.

The First Read will be the name of the artist who will be playing, to draw people in to read the next two reads.

The Second Read is the date and time of the event and the price of the tickets.

The Third Read is extra details like who created the event and etc.

These three reads can easily be converted to game design like this:

The First Read => What draws you in? => The Core of the Game.

The Second Read => The Key Details =>. Big Unintuitive Rules.

The Third Rules => Contextual Information => Contextual Rules

But because games can move and be animated, you can add some advanced concepts to this to make the game flow much better and easier to read what is happening as you advance in the game.

The first advanced concept is to use animation to swap reads. This can easily be seen in card games, such as Hearthstone, where the cards you choose to play and actions you do are constantly swapping between reads, making it much easier to read the flow of the game.

                              Hearthstone - swapping between reads

Another advanced concept that Zach mentioned was to toggle to the Fourth Read. This is the first time that the Fourth Read is mentioned. In digital games, a very common thing is the menu that can be toggle on or off. So to make the game not look to busy when playing the game, it is suggested that you create a toggle for the menu. This way you can toggle it into the Fourth Read which basically means you cannot see it or read it.

Overall, even if this blogpost may seem to be directed more towards mobile game designers, they are concepts that can be used by anyone, even if not all, but some can come in great assistance.

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