On Gameplay, or Creating, Developing, and Balancing Your Game Concept

The Preliminaries

Given some broad path to follow in designing a new game - one suggested by such things as which audience you intend to pander to, or what you are known for or interested in or think yourself capable of producing, or, perhaps least noble, what has been selling the best in recent memory - there remains the task of determining what the player is to be presented with in terms of actual gameplay.

Gameplay is ultimately and always the product of a system of rules. Some systems of rules are simpler than others. Chess, ironically enough, is an example of …