In game design, knowing what you need is a lot more powerful than knowing what you want. Here’s an example from a raid we made in Destiny.

We were working on Wrath of the Machine— a Mad Max inspired adventure. In several encounters we were going to have something new to Destiny, balls you could pick up and throw at things.

Since these balls were going to be in a bunch of different places in the raid, and we needed a device to make them appear.

Basically we wanted one of these.

But then comes along our Art Director and he’s like hey these objects seem like they’re going to be in the raid a lot. Let’s concept them.

And he didn’t ask us what we wanted for the device (A bowling ball dispenser) he asked us what we needed.

So we told him well really we just need a thing to make a ball, it needs to be about this big, and it needs to take about this long.

So he told us to work with Sung Choi, a new concept artist, to get an illustration.

And in my mind it seemed like a total waste of time to concept a bowling ball machine but I wasn’t going to say no.

Then Sung starts sending messages like “Hey fallen are like machine spider people, and these guys are the mad max versions, thinking about how they would make these balls.”

And he’s also sending like no context pictures of circus food?

Then he drops the bomb. Hey what if the machine looked something like this?

And sweet Jesus what we wanted was just a dumb bowling ball machine.

By telling Sung what we needed instead of what we wanted, we got to leverage his amazing mind to create something way more inspired.

These devices were planned to just be forgettable non-sense but because the developer understood the box they could play in, we ended up with one of the coolest animated objects in the game.