Designing a Game for Emergent Gameplay : Developing Gatedelvers

Abstract

Emergent gameplay can offer great benefits to a game’s design when used effectively. The objective of this thesis was to create a design tool for adding emergence to a game and then use that tool in order to design a game product.

This thesis collected information through literary and game analysis to create a tool that designers could use to add emergent gameplay to their games. The design tool focuses on actions the designer can take during the design process to encourage emergence.

A game product was then created with the help of the tool. The game product was named Gatedelvers and is a dungeon crawler with a focus on combining emergent gameplay with procedural generation to create gameplay variety. Playtesting was conducted on the game with generally favorable results, although playtesting was limited due to external circumstances.

Both the design tool and game product can be considered to be successful, but further testing and experimentation would be necessary to confirm the tool’s effectiveness.