Top-Down vs Bottom-Up in Game Design

Hey crew, let’s talk about “top-down” vs “bottom-up” design. 

These design concepts refer to where you start your design.  Do you start with the story you want to tell and figure out mechanics for it?  Or do you start by building cool mechanics and then trying to work out what they might fit narratively? 

Which is which? Well, so far as I know, the terms themselves come from the old-school Magic days. Do start your design at the top of the card, where the name lives, or do you start your design at the bottom, where all the stats and rules reside?  

And, truth?  That’s a pretty good way to think about it, because it makes you realize how few tools you have on a card to express everything it’s supposed to represent.

Recently, we talked about “gutters” and providing the imaginative space for the player.  This week we’re going to talk a little bit about how we do that.

So let’s talk bottom-up design first.  When do you do it?  What does it look like?  And what dangers are there in this type of design?

The first answer is easy: you start bottom-up either because you have a cool idea for a mechanic or because you want to try something mechanically that you’ve never experimented with and so haven’t figured out what it “means” in the language of your game.

So what does this look like? Well, in our game we have a card called Rat Tat. And, some other cards that can count as Rat Tat.

But these cards are mostly taken by the Solo because they start with a few in their deck.  I didn’t want this to be the case.  I wanted to encourage some other folks to dip a toe into the Rat Tat pool, because one of the coolest aspects about these cards is…

See how it says it counts “All the Rat Tats in the Plan and in your discard?” ALL the Rat Tats in the Plan - it very specifically doesn’t say “All your Rat Tats in the Plan”.  This means that, in a really coordinated group, if other people are willing to invest in some Rat Tats you can get some seriously huge damage going.  

After all, most of the time you’re going to play once, maybe twice per Plan.  This means that if the Solo is the only player with Rat Tats they’re only going to get one in the Plan, and it might hit hard because of their discard pile but it’s never going to do exponential nonsense. To achieve that, we have to get other people picking up Rat Tats.  

So how do we do that?  Well, first we have to get out of the headspace of designing the normal Rat Tats, we have to break our templating and peel off the section that says “or in your discard”.  Because, so long as it has that phrase, the Solo, who has a bunch of them, is just going to keep wanting to stack more and no one else is going to feel invited to take them - because, after all, they have no Rat Tats.

But we have to take one more step.  We also have to make a Rat Tat that fits with what other people are doing.  So I looked through the other role mechanics to figure out what might tempt someone to take a card that, on first glance, doesn’t seem like it synergizes with their stuff.

And the clear winner was the Plan extension mechanic.  If I wanted to make a Rat Tat appealing to other players, I had to make it a cantrip.  I had to make it provide a little value for basically no cost so that way if the player just missed with the Rat Tat part of it, it wouldn’t feel that bad.

(Note: For those of you less familiar with the mechanics of Cyberpunk Legends, extending the Plan effectively gives another player an extra turn.  So even if it eats your turn for a small benefit, the party as a whole is ahead.  While not exclusively a Netrunner thing, they specialize in it.)

Now, see how this all happened without me ever mentioning the card’s name or what it might look like?  That’s how bottom-up design works.  I didn’t know anything about it creatively and I kept myself from wandering down that path until I had the card’s mechanics worked out.

Once I did though I could think about what those mechanics might mean in narrative terms and I imagined the Netrunner taking over a security turret and turning it on the enemy forces. 

So I ended up with:

Which will eventually have a picture of a sentry gun firing on unsuspecting foes.

And that’s what bottom-up design is good for. bottom-up design is great when you have a specific design problem you want to solve.  It allows you to focus wholly on the game design and not be distracted by the rest of the creative side.

But why not do both, you say?  Often we do, but imagine this scenario:  You’re a Magic designer.  You’ve just been assigned to create a card called Hellraiser DRAGONGOD!!! with awesome art of a dragon setting a whole world ablaze.  What do you create?

I bet not one of you said a 0/1 that dies into a food token and can pull itself out of the graveyard… because as soon as we have creative direction it influences our thinking.  To truly have a blank canvas to create mechanics sometimes they need to be totally abstracted so we’re free to try the truly wild and “wrong” ideas.

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Aaaaaaaaaand I’ve gone on way too long about this… so long in fact I’ll have to talk about top-down next time… but there’s one thing I do want to raise a flag about with bottom up design before we go. So a word of warning: if you do this and your team’s not really careful about it, it often ends up with mechanics that feel very tacked on to the other creative aspects of a card.

I’m sure you can all think of some cards in your favorite CCGs where, sure, there’s some mechanics on the card, but their relation to the name and the art is… tenuous at best. They don’t really make you feel like whatever the name and the art imply.  And when this happens the card just becomes a game piece, not something that transports you to another world… but if we’re careful with our design, we can achieve both.

And with that I’ll just say: join me next time for an actual discussion of… top down design!

-JP