Matt Allmer (EA, Page 44 Studios) was frustrated by game-design writing that was either too broad or too obvious — so he did what the industry does best and borrowed from Disney. He re-imagined the 12 Principles of Animation for gameplay and added a 13th, framing the list as a reference sheet to cover your bases before presenting a design.
The principles group into six compartments:
- Direction — 1. Focal Point: never let the player guess what to focus on. 2. Anticipation: always factor in time to signal something is about to happen. 3. Announce Change: communicate changes, scaled to rarity — a cue needed five times per game is worth far more than one needed a hundred times an hour.
- Behavior — 4. Believable Events: every action and reaction must pass the player’s subconscious acceptance test. 5. Overlapping Events: dynamism dies when only one thing happens at a time. 6. Physics: start from known physical logic, don’t be limited by it. 7. Sound: “what sound does it make when ___ happens?”
- Progression — 8. Pacing: spread out moments of high concentration and mix the sense of urgency.
- Environment — 9. Spacing: understand on-screen and in-world space and the relationships between elements.
- Method — 10. Linear Design vs Component Breakdown: solving challenges as they come versus systemic categorization — pre-production favors breakdown, late publisher changes favor linear.
- Foundation — 11. Player: if the player isn’t into it, change or scrap it. 12. Communication: an idea you can’t communicate correctly might as well be a bad idea. 13. Appeal: does it draw in the player, the spectator, and your fellow developers?
The strength is the execution, not the novelty: every principle gets worked examples across level design, system design, UI, and story, which makes it a self-review checklist rather than another theory of fun. The stated goal — an anchor that tells you which rules you can safely break — is the right way to use any design framework.