Starting this week, we'll be running a weekly Design Challenge. The Design Challenge is an exercise in becoming a game developer, asking you to look at games in a new way — from the perspective of a game creator, producer, marketer, businessperson, and so forth.

Each Wednesday I'll propose a design question. You'll have one week to answer it (see below for how to submit your answers). The following week, the best answers and the names of those who submitted them will be posted along with some commentary.

James Portnow's Design Challenge [GameCareerGuide]

The trap of perfectionism is particularly treacherous for computer programmers, since we're saddled atop of Turing-complete programming languages that are capable of doing almost anything. Every bug is fixable. Every behavioral rough spot can be smoothed over with just a bit more coding, a smidgen of extra special-case logic. Programming isn't like carving something out of marble, where if your sculpture's nose is too small, you must either live with it or start over with a fresh block of marble. Our code bases can be massaged indefinitely.

In designing a game to explore this issue, I thought about players tweaking some set of game objects toward a goal, but forcing them to decide how far toward the goal they needed to go. If we give the players multiple sets of game objects and goals, and force them to divide their limited time among these "subprojects," they will need to make interesting decisions about which projects to polish, which to leave flawed, in which to skip completely. This is quite different from traditional level-based game designs, where players must finish a given level before moving on to a subsequent level.

It's an interesting read and it's nice to actually be able to play a prototype of exactly what's being discussed in the article.

Game Design Sketchbook: Perfectionism [The Escapist]

Another month, another Lost Garden prototyping challenge: this time, the theme is 'god games' like Populous on a "smaller, more casual scale."

For those of you who wonder why there aren't more original games, this can be a great learning experience. The first lesson is that original design isn't usually constrained by technology. I've intentionally kept the engine requirements rather low tech. Instead, the biggest challenge becomes the mental shift from 'implementing a spec' to 'finding the fun in a new game system.' These are two very different skills. If you merely implement an original design, you'll often end up with unplayable garbage. Instead you have to dig for the fun.

And just in case you think nothing ever comes of this stuff, Danc recently posted a whole slew of SpaceCute prototypes. Being someone who's closest interaction with design anything is the final product, it's fun watching the evolution, even for something as low key and painfully cute as the Lost Garden designs. Maggie Greene

CuteGod: A Prototyping Challenge [Lost Garden]

In the same vein as yesterday's "prototyping for fun and profit" (and their wonderfully low-fi, "we're game designers not artists" graphics), Danc over at Lost Garden has tossed up some tools for those of you who are good at designing game mechanics, but not so great at the whole "graphics" thing. The theory is use these building blocks, spending less time trying to make your game prototype attractive, more time making the game play fun. The set is in the same vein as the graphic set for his prototyping challenge, SpaceCute, so it's, well, cute. Painfully so, perhaps.

He outlines a couple of problems he sees with the way indie developers frequently deal with prototype graphics, including "MS Paint, in all its heavenly glory," mangling free graphics sets, sets that are hard to use, so he's put together a set based on "building blocks, not tile sets." He claims that if you can snap together Legos, you can manage to work with his PlanetCute prototyping tiles. Having met plenty of people who I'm not sure could snap together more complex Lego sets, I'm not so sure this is true, but one would hope they would not be designing games. Maggie Greene

Danc's Miraculously Flexible Game Prototyping Tiles [Lost Garden]