Start with a feeling: How to define your first video game

You’ve got an idea. Maybe it’s a game about a lighthouse keeper, a cat who runs a bakery, or a heist on a space station.

So where do you start?

Start with a feeling. Before you decide what the player collects, unlocks, or fights, decide how you want them to feel while they play. Everything else – the art, the rules, the length, the music – follows from that one choice.

Whether you’re opening a traditional game engine or prompting the game using AI, but you’ll still be making the decisions an engine helps you structure. This one comes first.

Features tell you what to build, not why

When you’re new to making video games, it’s natural to start with a list: an inventory, a crafting system, a map, maybe a boss fight. Lists feel productive. But a feature list can’t tell you which features matter, which ones to cut, or whether they’ll add up to anything.

Experienced designers flip the order. As designer Justin Gary puts it, player experience is “the most important metric,” and everything else is “just the machinery built to serve that goal.”

That matters even more when an AI tool handles the building for you. When a tool builds the game from your description, the result can only be as clear as the description you give it. “A farming game with crafting” gives an AI tool very little to go on. “A slow, cozy game where tending a garden feels like caring for a friend” gives it a direction for every choice – color, pacing, sound, and even what to leave out.

“Fun” isn’t specific enough to steer by

Every game wants to be fun. That’s exactly the problem. Game design leader Jenna Hoffstein, who most recently led a game design team at Hasbro, calls “make it more fun” one of the most common, and least useful, pieces of feedback in game development. Her fix is to break enjoyment into distinct emotional experiences, like mastery, surprise, social connection, and expression.

Players come to games for different reasons, too. Quantic Foundry, which has surveyed nearly two million gamers since 2015, tracks 12 separate motivations behind why people play. You don’t need to satisfy all of them. Your game gets stronger when you pick one or two and commit.

Try it now. From this list, pick the one feeling you most want a player to walk away with:

• Calm
• Dread
• Triumph
• Curiosity
• Belonging
• Mischief
• Wonder

If two feel equally right, that’s fine. If five do, keep narrowing.

Decide who the player gets to be

A feeling sets the mood. A fantasy sets the role. Together, they make up what designers often call a game’s core experience.

Narrative designer Greg Buchanan describes the core experience as close to “the ‘fantasy’ of who your character is as a player, and what you’re doing.” It isn’t the plot, and it isn’t the character’s name. In his words, “the player needs to know what they are, more than who they are.”

You try it. Finish this sentence:

You are a ___ who ___.

A night-shift baker who keeps a tired city fed? A lost robot learning what home means? A lighthouse keeper who’s the last light on a dark coast? Don’t worry about getting it perfect. You’re looking for something that makes you want to play it.

Write one sentence, then three pillars

Now combine your feeling and your fantasy into a single experience statement:

My game makes the player feel [feeling] by letting them be [role] who [core action].

For example: “My game makes the player feel calm and needed by letting them be a lighthouse keeper who guides lost ships home.”

Next, break that sentence into design pillars – short rules that describe the experience your game has to deliver. Most guides suggest three or four. With fewer, they’re too broad to rule anything out. With more, almost any idea fits one of them. Good pillars name feelings or rules, not features or genres.

For the lighthouse game example, they might be:

• No rush, ever.
• Small acts of care matter.
• The coast remembers you.

Indie team Saltstone Studios used pillars to shape its first game, The Pale Beyond. One of them, Every Decision Has a Face, meant players always saw the character a choice would affect – which went on to shape the game’s systems and character design. The team calls its pillars “probably the main reason our first game was any good at all.”

Let the feeling make decisions for you

Your experience statement isn’t a slogan. It’s a filter. Every time a new idea shows up – and they will – ask one question: does this serve a pillar?

If it does, keep it. If it doesn’t, park it, even if it’s a good idea. A great idea for a different game still belongs to a different game. In the lighthouse game, a ticking timer might add tension, but ‘no rush, ever’ rules it out straight away.

The same filter will guide every decision coming up in this series. Calm points toward a soft color palette and gentle sound. Dread points toward tight framing and long silences. Triumph points toward big, readable feedback when the player wins. You won’t necessarily be setting up cameras or lighting in an engine, but you’ll still be choosing what the player sees, hears, and does – and now you know what you’re choosing for.

Ready to try defining your video game? You don't need to be a developer. Try Unity Spark, Unity's browser-based, AI game creation platform that allows you to describe your game, refine it in a real web editor, and publish it for others to play.

*Header image note: One orange character makes the same jump three ways: calm at dusk, scared in a storm, amazed by an aurora. Image generated by Claude Opus 5.5, October 26, 2026.