Applying “Exploration” as a Philosophy for Designing and Developing Video Games With Conceptual Coherence
Many video game designers today employ an architected design philosophy focused on realizing a preconceived vision. This approach frequently births conflicts between game play and story, breaking the conceptual coherence of the game. In the past few years a small number of video game designers have utilized a design philosophy that centers around thorough exploration of a theme. This “exploration” design philosophy is only beginning to gain traction, mostly among indie game developers, but it has produced some very conceptually cohesive games such as Braid and Portal. This thesis explores the techniques and decisions involved in video game development using exploration as a design philosophy. The goal is to utilize a framework for exploration and decision making to create a game that is indeed conceptually cohesive.