✦ primoh.coGame design course

Genre, audience, and studying games

Use familiar conventions deliberately and compare designs without copying their scale.

Lesson 13 of 149 min + exercise

Return to the audience chosen in lesson one. Genre conventions are learned shortcuts that can help players understand a game. Study nearby examples, identify their promises, and choose which assumptions to preserve or challenge.

Concepts

Genre sets expectations
Players bring expectations about controls, pacing, progression, and fairness. A label can guide discovery but does not define a homogeneous audience.
Novelty and learning cost
A familiar structure can make a new idea easier to approach. Each unfamiliar rule takes time to learn, so choose where you want players to spend that effort.
Comparative analysis
Compare a specific situation across two games: what can a player do, what information exists, and what does failure cost? Feature checklists miss the interaction between parts.
Evidence and interpretation
Official rules establish what a game offers. Developer accounts explain intentions and production choices. Your teardown proposes how those features might affect experience; sales or popularity do not prove the explanation.

In games

Balatro ↗

Poker-hand names provide a starting point, while the surrounding scoring and modifier system still needs its own teaching.

Brawl Stars ↗

Consider touch input, repeated matches, and shared objectives as connected design choices. Avoid assuming every phone player wants the same duration or complexity.

Common mistakes

  • Calling a design original because you have not studied comparable games.
  • Assuming familiarity with one convention transfers to every system.
  • Explaining a hit game with a single feature while ignoring audience, timing, and distribution.

Compare two small moments

  1. Pick two studies from the library that share a design question.
  2. Compare actions, information, stakes, and feedback in one situation.
  3. Choose one principle you can test in your own small game, and state where the analogy might fail.

Done when: Your comparison explains a difference in experience and names its evidence limits.

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Check your understanding

A popular game uses daily rewards. Does that establish daily rewards as the reason it became popular?

Show answer

No. That is a causal claim needing stronger evidence. The feature may contribute differently for different players, and many other factors can explain popularity.

Sources

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