Design Guidance for Creators

Overview

This competition challenges you to design a mobile game, not build one. Your submission is a complete pre-production package: a game design document (GDD), a player journey map, a visual concept package, and a production plan. Together, these four artifacts should tell one coherent story about a game that's ready to be built.

The strongest submissions demonstrate genuine design thinking and storytelling. That means going beyond describing a genre and showing us why your specific design choices create a compelling player experience. Judges are looking for depth, coherence, and creative vision across all four artifacts.

 

Genre Guidance

Choose one of the three genres below. The subgenre variations are suggestions, not constraints. You're welcome to put your own spin on it. Genre hybrids are also welcome. What matters is that your design delivers on the core challenge of your selected genre.

 

Survival & Resource Management

The core design challenge: Systems where players gather, craft, and survive escalating threats.

What judges want to see:

  • At least one depleting resource or survival condition that creates tension (hunger, health, energy, oxygen etc.)
  • A gathering + crafting loop where what you collect feeds into what you can build
  • Threats that escalate over time. The world should get harder the longer you play

Subgenre ideas: Idle survival, roguelike survival, horror survival, crafting sandbox, base-building, exploration survival

Tips:

  • The best survival designs make every resource decision feel like a tradeoff. If the player never has to choose between two needs, the loop isn't tight enough.
  • Escalation doesn't have to mean "more enemies." It can be weather, scarcity, map complexity, time pressure, or similar.
  • Show us the tension curve. Where does the player feel safe? Where do they feel desperate? How does that rhythm create engagement?

 

Simulation & Management

The core design challenge: Repeating invest-harvest-upgrade loops with visible growth.

What judges want to see:

  • A repeating invest, harvest, upgrade loop where output reinvests into progression
  • A working economy on paper. What the player earns should meaningfully feed back into growth
  • Multiple cycles with visible progress. The player should be able to see their world growing over time

Subgenre ideas: Farming sim, idle tycoon, restaurant/shop management, city builder, cozy sim, collection game, breeding/evolution sim

Tips:

  • Visible progression is key. Describe what the player's world looks like after 15 minutes compared to minute 1. New buildings, bigger plots, better tools, rarer items.
  • Don't underestimate the power of "cozy." A game doesn't need to be stressful to be compelling. Satisfying loops and aesthetic coherence go a long way.
  • The economy is the engine. If your design can't explain where resources come from, where they go, and what makes the player want more, the loop won't hold.

 

Tower Defense & Strategy

The core design challenge: Defensive systems with unit variety, escalation, and economy.

What judges want to see:

  • Defensive units or structures that the player places to stop incoming threats
  • Multiple unit types with distinct roles (damage, area control, slowing, support)
  • Escalating difficulty across waves
  • An economy for purchasing and upgrading units between rounds

Subgenre ideas: Lane tower defense, grid tower defense, auto-battler, real-time strategy, castle defense, horde survival, merge defense

Tips:

  • The fun in tower defense comes from planning and adaptation. Give players enough unit variety that placement decisions feel strategic, not random.
  • Escalation works best when new enemy types force the player to rethink their setup, not just place more of the same.
  • Economy tradeoffs are where strategy lives. Should the player upgrade existing units or buy new ones? Save for a powerful unit or spread resources across cheap ones? Design the tension.

 

Artifact Guidance

Your submission includes four artifacts. Each one serves a different purpose, and together they should tell a consistent story about one game.

Game Design Document (5-7 pages)

This is the backbone. It tells judges how you think about game design: what your game is, why your design choices work, and what makes it worth playing.

What makes a strong Game Design Document (GDD):

  • Design rationale, not just description. "The player gathers wood" is a feature list. "Wood is the bottleneck resource because it's needed for both shelter and tools, forcing the player to choose between safety and capability" is design thinking. Show us the why behind every major choice.
  • Specificity over abstraction. Don't describe a generic version of your genre. Describe your game. What makes your tower defense different from every other tower defense? That's where innovation lives.
  • Systems that connect. The best designs have mechanics that interact. Your crafting system should affect your survival loop. Your economy should create meaningful choices in your defense strategy. Show us how the pieces fit together.
  • Honest scoping. The "If I Had More Time" section is not filler. It shows judges you can distinguish between what's essential and what's aspirational. A designer who knows what to cut is more convincing than one who promises everything.

What to avoid:

  • Genre summaries disguised as design docs. If your GDD could describe any survival game, it doesn't describe yours.
  • Feature lists without justification. Every mechanic should earn its place. Why this feature? What does it add to the player experience?
  • Padding. Repetitive description that stretches to fill pages scores lower than sharp design thinking that earns every paragraph.

 

Player Journey Map (1-2 pages)

This is the artifact most creators haven't made before. It forces you to think through the actual player experience moment by moment, not just the system design.

What makes a strong journey map:

  • It's visual. A flowchart, annotated timeline, storyboard, or any visual representation that communicates the player's experience over time. This is not a written summary. It's a map.
  • It covers the first 15 minutes. What does the player see first? When do they make their first meaningful choice? How does difficulty ramp? Where does the first session end?
  • It shows emotional rhythm. Tension, reward, discovery, challenge. The best maps show how the game creates feelings, not just how it moves the player through features.
  • It reveals pacing decisions. When does the game teach? When does it test? When does it reward? How long is each beat? Pacing is design.

What to avoid:

  • Feature lists arranged vertically. A journey map that says "minute 1: tutorial, minute 3: first enemy, minute 5: crafting unlocks" is a timeline of features, not a player experience.
  • Ignoring the first 30 seconds. How the game opens determines whether the player stays. Show us you've thought about the first impression.
  • Disconnection from the GDD. If your design document describes a complex economy but your journey map shows the player doing the same thing for 15 minutes, something doesn't add up.

 

Visual Concept Package (up to 10 pages)

This is where you show your creative direction. Judges evaluate coherence, originality, and how well the visual identity serves the gameplay.

What makes a strong visual package:

  • A clear visual identity. The best packages communicate a mood and style that feels intentional. Color palette, lighting, art style, and UI should feel like they belong to the same game.
  • UI that serves gameplay. Wireframes or mockups that show how the player interacts with your game's systems. Where is the health bar? How does the crafting menu work? How does the player see their progression? UI design is game design.
  • World and character concepts that match your GDD. If your design document describes a horror survival game, your visual package shouldn't look like a cozy farm sim.
  • Coherence over polish. A rough but consistent visual direction scores higher than a collection of unrelated polished images. Judges want to see a vision, not a portfolio.

What to avoid:

  • Random image collections. Five AI-generated images with no unifying style or connection to your game concept won't score well.
  • All screenshots, no design concepts. A “mood board” sets the tone, but judges also want to see how your game looks. Include at least some screen mockups or scene concepts specific to your design.
  • Visual direction disconnected from gameplay. Pretty art that doesn't serve or reflect the game's mechanics and tone signals style without substance.

 

Production Plan (1-3 pages)

This is the bridge from design to build. It demonstrates that you can plan and execute, not just ideate.

What makes a strong production plan:

  • Clear build sequencing. What gets built first? What's the MVP that proves the core loop works? What layers on after? A credible sequence shows you understand how games come together.
  • Honest MVP scoping. What do you cut to ship the core experience? The ability to identify what's essential versus what's nice-to-have is a production skill.
  • Technical awareness. What does your game need to work? What are the hard parts? You don't need to be an engineer, but you should understand the dependencies in your design.

What to avoid:

  • Wishlists disguised as plans. A production plan that says "build everything" with no sequencing or prioritization isn't a plan.
  • Over-promising. A 1-page plan that's realistic and sequenced is more convincing than a 3-page plan that tries to do everything.

 

What Makes a Strong Submission

Your entry will be evaluated on the complete package. Here's what stands out:

Coherence across all four artifacts. Your GDD, journey map, visual package, and production plan should all describe the same game. If your design document promises deep progression but your journey map shows a flat experience, or your visual package doesn't match your game's tone or story progression, the submission loses credibility. Coherence & Feasibility is 20% of your score.

Design depth over volume. A tight, well-reasoned design scores higher than a sprawling one. Every section should earn its page count. If you can say it in five pages, don't stretch to seven.

Innovation within genre constraints. Vanilla implementations of your genre won't stand out. The best submissions take a familiar genre and add a creative twist: an unexpected mechanic, a novel progression system, a subgenre mashup that creates something new. Design Innovation is 25% of your score.

A mobile game that could actually be built. Feasibility matters. Judges ask: could someone take this design package and start building? If the answer is yes, the submission is doing its job.

 

Common Pitfalls

  • Inconsistency across artifacts. If your GDD describes one game, your journey map implies another, and your visual package matches neither, the submission falls apart. Read your four artifacts together before you submit. They should feel like one package, not four separate assignments.
  • Treating the Player Journey Map as optional effort. This is the artifact that most directly reveals whether you've thought through the player experience or just described systems. It's worth the investment.
  • Confusing volume with depth. Judges read hundreds of submissions. A tight design that earns every page will always outscore a padded one that fills space.