When explaining an idea to one of my friend, I accidentally called the concept hourglass design, and I am going to explain what I mean by that right now. Look at the attached picture.
When designing games, most of the time people do what could be called abstraction design.
At the beginning there is a concept taken in real life. In order for this concept to be placed in a game it needs to be simplified.
For example:
Concept: Army composed of people, personel, equipment, tents, etc.
Once you made abstration of these concepts, you end up with:
Players can have 4 type of units: Infantry, artillery cavalry and ships which are each represented by a different miniature.
So it could be summarized as:start large, end simple.
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In and hour class design, things are different, it could be summarized as
Start large, shrink it to extremely simple and than expand it again to average complex.
For example:
Concept: Same as above
Extreme Simplification: An army is represented on the board with a pawn.
Expansion: When the army enter a battle, you use unit cards that are going to detail the composition of your army. These cards are ignored if the army is not in a battle.
In the design above, when you extremely simplify, everything disappears: the cavalry, the artillery, etc. Then when a combat occur, everything complexify itself. But still, the level of complexity is lower that the original concept to make it used in a game.
By using a design like this, it allows to add more complexity more easily to a board game where normally it would have been impossible to manage. The idea is that the complexity only show up in a certain situation rather than all the time.
What do you think?
I am happy that my ideas can help people.