Extract Gameplay Material from the Novel
| Item | Design |
|---|---|
| The protagonist repeatedly investigates, compares or probes | Turn it into a design question: What information could lead the player to different judgments?; Avoid jumping straight to this: Turning every investigation scene into a hidden-object search |
| The protagonist manages resources and commitments | Turn it into a design question: Whose opportunities to act change when resources are allocated?; Avoid jumping straight to this: Adding a gold progress bar to every plot segment |
| Relationships determine whether something can be accomplished | Turn it into a design question: Whom does the player ask for help, what do they disclose and what do they take on?; Avoid jumping straight to this: Reducing all specific relationships to one affinity score |
| World rules have conditions and exceptions | Turn it into a design question: How does the player learn the rules, exploit constraints and face countermoves?; Avoid jumping straight to this: Putting the rules only in the opening explanation |
| The source has a one-off climax | Turn it into a design question: Does this scene work as an ending, or can it recur with variation?; Avoid jumping straight to this: Treating a singular spectacle as the loop for the whole game |
Distinguish facts already established in the source from design decisions you add. If the novel does not say whether a resource replenishes, who can refuse or what failure causes, record that as a question to decide during adaptation. Do not quietly present the answer as part of the original setting.
Write the Loop Before Naming the Genre
Use this editorial worksheet for each candidate. It organizes the skill’s checks for loops, agency, and scope; these fields are not a native file format:
Player role: What can they access, and whose decisions can they not make?
Repeated action: What do they observe or receive → what do they choose → what do they carry out?
Feedback: How does the player know their judgment had consequences?
Persistent change: What information, resource, relationship or opportunity carries into the next round?
Source-specific feature: Which rule changes the target, order or cost of an action, or the world’s response?
Opening scope: What single situation would show whether this loop works?
You may need very few actions. What matters is how the player judges and intervenes, and whether the world remembers specific events. Even a story with a fixed ending can give the journey meaning: who agrees to accompany the player, which promise is kept or how characters understand the final outcome can change.
Three Original Designs: A Workshop That Repairs Voices
Fictional source seed: A small town preserves people’s voices in pottery shards. A craftsperson can restore only the stretch of recording near a crack; the repair grinds away adjacent passages. Clients often want to save different lines, and a shard may contain a past they would rather not acknowledge.
The following are three new game designs based on that seed. Their specific actions and feedback are adaptation decisions introduced for this example.
| Item | Design |
|---|---|
| Audio puzzles | What the player repeatedly does: Listen to fragments, judge what is worth repairing and choose a treatment order; How the source rule enters play: Restoring one passage destroys neighbouring information, so the order changes the clues that remain; How the world responds: New passages support or overturn the current hypothesis; some clues are lost permanently |
| Workshop management | What the player repeatedly does: Accept commissions, schedule work and negotiate which content clients want preserved; How the source rule enters play: Revenue alone cannot determine an order’s value: some voice passages cannot both be saved; How the world responds: Clients choose to return, cancel or bring new requests based on the words actually preserved |
| Interactive narrative | What the player repeatedly does: After hearing part of a recording, decide whom to tell what and which promise to keep; How the source rule enters play: The craftsperson has limited knowledge; lost passages leave gaps in any explanation; How the world responds: Characters change their cooperation and trust according to the specific information shared, rather than merely adding to a relationship score |
All three can share the pottery-shard setting while emphasising different experiences. The first centres on evidence and repair order; the second on managing competing promises; the third on information and relationship consequences.
If you most want players to feel that “saving one sentence means losing another,” the first puts that tension most directly into their actions. If the creative focus is the craftsperson’s long-term relationships with the town’s residents, the other two may fit better. Choose according to what you want players to take responsibility for themselves, not which genre sounds bigger.
Spot a Design That Only Reskins the Novel
Temporarily replace proper nouns with ordinary labels and see whether the gameplay still retains what distinguishes the source.
In the workshop example, suppose the player only clicks a button, pays a fixed amount of gold and hears predetermined dialogue. If the shard’s wear rule never changes the available actions, the novel’s central tension remains trapped in explanatory text. Ask:
- Does the player change the causes and direction of events, or merely pay to let the same plot segment proceed?
- Does the world respond to their specific choices, or deliver the same assessment regardless of which sentence they save?
- Do source rules change action order, costs or available information?
- Does progression change abilities, understanding or opportunities, or do only the numbers get larger?
Games in the same genre can share basic actions. Distinction should appear in what those actions affect, the trade-offs and the consequences. You do not need to pile on systems just to appear original.
Compare Small, Complete Situations Before Adapting the Whole Book
Write a small situation you can complete for each direction: one client, one shard, one decision affecting what follows and one observable result. Walk through it on paper first, marking what comes from the source and what is new design, then decide what to implement.
The opening of the puzzle design could offer two short audio fragments and ask players which side to restore first. Afterwards, show what they gained and lost, and let them revisit the information available before the decision. This tests whether repair order genuinely changes understanding.
The opening of the management design must at least make a conflict between commitments and the result of negotiation visible. If you only have time for one order that requires no trade-off, that is not enough to establish a management loop. Narrow the design promise or compare other directions first.
Do not claim that the entire book is playable on the strength of a brief demo. Concept selection only identifies a direction worth testing further. The novel-to-game workflow then covers design, implementation and testing in a running build.
FAQ
Does a dialogue-heavy novel suit a visual novel?
Consider a visual novel as one candidate, then check whether the dialogue contains information, relationships and choices that give the player meaningful judgments to make. If they can only keep clicking to the next page, the experience remains reading. To promise interactive consequences, design how conversations change later opportunities or responses.
Must the player take the role of the original protagonist?
If the role is not fixed yet, compare the actions available to the protagonist, an original character, a faction or an observer. Changing roles changes what can be known and which decisions can be made. Identify this as adaptation design rather than automatically inheriting every power of the protagonist.
Do it with the skill
In a project that already has SOURCE_BIBLE.md and PRODUCT_BRIEF.md, say in Claude Code: “Use /game-concept to propose different gameplay concepts based on the novel material already analysed. Compare repeated player actions, how source rules affect those actions, specific world responses and the smallest testable situation. Separate new design from source facts.” In Codex, use $game-concept.
Read the method: Method used in this article