Design Templates in Purposeful Games: A Case Study of a Creative Decision-Making Game

Designers often work in time-constrained situations during the design process. Among others, one strategy that they use to overcome such difficulty is by using design templates or patterns. A design template is a pre-defined structure of solution, which can be repurposed based on different problem scenarios. The major advantage of using such a template is that the designer does not have to start from scratch, which gives him/her a head start. In this paper, we discuss the use of design templates in game design, which is an under explored area. We also present a case study of how we repurposed the game design template to build a creative decision-making game for novice project managers.