After Atomizing and Abstracting Game Mechanics down to their most fundamental components, they can be abstracted into design patters (such as Set Packing, Time Limits, Equipment, Node Traversal, etc).
There is no comprehensive list of design patterns, and even more interesting is that patterns are often isomorphic to one another, meaning that the same abstract experience can be described by multiple different mathematical formulations.
- An example Raph Koster gives in his 2014 GDC talk is that Sudoko can be described equally well as either a “Build the Map” problem or a “Set Packing” problem.
A meaningful part of a talent game designer’s job is to dedicate time to building out a personal game pattern library. This isn’t necessarily done explicitly, but rather through exposing oneself to as wide a variety of games (rules constructs) as possible.