Summary
Emergent design is the practice of building systems whose interesting outcomes come from interactions between rules rather than from pre-authored solutions. Bycer’s Infinifactory case illustrates this well: the puzzle space becomes compelling because players construct their own solutions within a rule framework, discovering behaviours the designer did not have to script step by step. (Bycer, 20 Essential Games to Study, see source-20-essential-games-to-study)
Key ideas
- simple rules can yield rich solution spaces
- player creativity matters as much as authored content
- the designer shapes constraints rather than prescribing every answer
- interactions should live in global rules, not inside individual puzzles, so that adding one object adds possibilities everywhere (“multiplicative” rather than “additive” design)
In practice
Emergent design benefits from:
- clear local rules
- combinable systems
- space for multiple valid solutions
- evaluation focused on possibility space rather than only intended paths
A common architecture: tagged objects plus global rules
Many systemic games share a similar structure, which The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild states unusually clearly:
- Give objects properties, not scripts. Each object carries tags or a material type (flammable, metal, light, wet) instead of puzzle-specific logic.
- Write the interactions once, as global rules. A single rule table says what each element or force does to each property. Breath of the Wild’s chemistry engine uses three rules: elements change the state of materials, elements change each other, and materials do not change each other directly (Dohta, Breaking Conventions with The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, GDC 2017, see source-botw-breaking-conventions-gdc-2017).
- Apply the rules to everything, the player included. The player character and weapons are materials like trees and rocks, so knowledge learned on one object transfers to all of them.
- Keep state separate from motion. A physics engine moves things; a separate state system decides what they are (burning, wet, frozen), with a narrow hand-off between them (wind pushing objects, for example).
- Author situations and goals, not solutions. Designers place a problem and a goal, with an intended answer, and accept other answers as valid.
The Unity-scale version of this architecture, with compiled C# scripts, is on breath-of-the-wild.
Evidence
Bycer uses Infinifactory as a lesson in puzzle systems that remain interesting because they invite player-devised constructions rather than one fixed method. (Bycer, 20 Essential Games to Study, see source-20-essential-games-to-study)
Nintendo’s Breath of the Wild team describe the same idea from the production side. Director Hidemaro Fujibayashi said earlier Zelda puzzles used objects “made specifically for those puzzles”, a “development by addition” that polishes well but does not scale, and replaced it with “multiplicative gameplay”: “make the game so that objects react to the player’s action, and the object[s] themselves also influence each other”. Technical director Takuhiro Dohta reported that “if you unify your game world with a set of consistent physics rules, the player will come up with ideas for all sorts of things they want to try” (Fujibayashi and Dohta, Breaking Conventions with The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, GDC 2017, see source-botw-breaking-conventions-gdc-2017).
Implications
Emergent design is closely tied to second-order-design: the designer builds the rule-space, and the interesting play emerges inside it.
Both sources suggest that the designer’s job moves from writing answers to choosing rules that are consistent, readable and few enough to test.
Open questions
- When does openness become noise rather than richness?
- How can designers preserve readability when solution spaces become very broad?