A guide to systems-based game development

In my senior year at the University of Michigan, one of my roommates and I had a nightly tradition: playing NCAA Football 2005 (it was 2007). We played every night because we were constantly learning each other’s strategies, adapting, and trying to come up with new ways to surprise each other. One of us would eventually win, but we would be able to talk about and dissect our match for a solid 15–30 minutes after we were done. Every night. We don’t think of EA Sports games like we do Deus Ex, but you can’t say that’s anything but a purely systems-driven game. The goal of this article is to really help clarify the benefits and results of systems-based design for players and then to discuss the development side of achieving those experiences and why my small team is creating a systems-based game.

When we talk about a game having good systems, we are essentially saying that it has deep mechanics. That’s not inaccurate, but it does skip over the larger point: a game having good systems means that the game itself is a good simulation. Simulation in this sense is the result of a “holistic systems-based game design” and not games considered to typically be in the simulation genre.