Outline

[Snowreap]

game design and game engineering are two different, but related things.

it does you no good to design a game that's impossible to engineer (meaning, not implementable given the available budget). but on the flip side, just because it's possible to engineer something doesn't mean you necessarily want it as part of your design. you can find plenty of examples of bad game design where a feature was included just because the underlying engine was capable of it, but the feature doesn't actually add to the game -- in fact it detracts from it.

so engineering considerations always need to be taken into consideration, because they might veto your design.

all that is a given, and I assume everyone here was already aware of it. the reason for my post then, is to pose this question: how do you want to address it? as a part of each design item, or as a separate "Game Engineering" category, distinct from "Game Design"?

splitting things up makes the design elements more self-contained (since the engineering considerations are right there). but splitting things up also introduces the very real danger of thinking that just because any particular design feature is possible, all of them are. when in fact, you might find that only 3 out of 20 design features can be included as designed (although which 3 you choose doesn't matter from an engineering perspective).

-ken