Do you rate the gameplay elements of your game? If you don't, you should!

By gameplay elements, I mean things like:

Relationships
Harvesting
Home Decorating
Island Design
Random Encounters
Fishing
Visiting Islands

Those are some of the gameplay elements of Animal Crossing.

Think of some of the games you consider comps--games that are similar enough that you mentally use them as reference.

Make a table in your favorite editor (Word, Google Docs, whatever).

Across the top, list all of the relevant gameplay elements.

In the first column, list the comps first and then your game.

Starting with the first comp, rate the percentage of player time spent in the gameplay element, so that it all adds up to 100%. There's a bit of complexity here I'll circle back around to.

It's an interesting exercise in itself, just thinking through how each comp uses the element. Make notes of any ideas that come up, of course.

Now you're done with the comps and looking at the line with your own game on it. That's a special moment full of promise for you!

Think through rating the percentage of each gameplay element for your game. This is one of the most important decisions you can make as a designer--how is the player spending her time?

You're deciding what matters the most in your game.

This table is a living design document now. When folks on the team (or just you) have scheduled playtest sessions (you have those... right?), ask them to track how much time they spend in each element. Are the elements you want to be major time sinks not panning out? Why is that?

Ask your team (or alpha testers) to rate each gameplay element for FUN. Does that match up with where you rated they should be spending the most time?

This brings up the bit of complexity I mentioned at the start. Some players dislike side elements and don't play them.

And some games are intentionally multi-element and element-agnostic. Free Realms is an example. While I rated specific percentages for things like Socializing and Shopping, I knew my ratings for all the jobs/minigames was a demographics guess and NOT me making a design choice.

The game was very intentionally designed so that you could focus on any job at any time in a free-form environment. This situation only applies if the elements are genuinely equal in terms of presence in the world, potential play time, level cap, etc.

As you become more familiar and comfortable with the concept, this gameplay element rating table becomes a powerful tool you'll refer back to during the entire dev cycle. You'll even use it after launch if you wire analytics to tell you what players are ACTUALLY spending time on.

Everyone who's worked on a game that was a "genre plus X" game knows that a lot of players don't give a crap about the X. I'm talking about "it's a shooter but you can also craft new guns." Some players will get super into crafting, and some do the bare minimum to finish.

I'm talking about playstyles here. It's often worth the effort--once you're familiar with using the table--to take the time and define your game's playstyles. For example, Explorer is a major playstyle for open world games. How does Explorer map to each game element?

Diving from top-level generic playstyle game element ratings all the way down through each distinct playstyle generates an enormous amount of core decision-making around the player experience. This is the heart of your game, in a table.