Game design is not about art, writing, or programming. Game design is about creating the rules that lead to emergent, interactive experiences.
There is an actual science to game design. It's not enough to just think of a story and move an avatar around on the screen. The game must create flow so the player is receptive to emotional arousal, then use game mechanics to invoke emotional arousal, and then add fiction/narrative so that the player labels the arousal as a particular emotion. A good game designer has to consider all of this and much more... strategies, equilibrium, balance, skill levels, and so on.
If you clone an existing game you basically get all of those design decisions for free, but you don't understand the background. This can lead to a case where you tweak or add something to your game which completely throws it off balance, without realizing it and without being able to fix it.
Game design is not about art, writing, or programming. Game design is about creating the rules that lead to emergent, interactive experiences.
There is an actual science to game design. It's not enough to just think of a story and move an avatar around on the screen. The game must create flow so the player is receptive to emotional arousal, then use game mechanics to invoke emotional arousal, and then add fiction/narrative so that the player labels the arousal as a particular emotion. A good game designer has to consider all of this and much more... strategies, equilibrium, balance, skill levels, and so on.
If you clone an existing game you basically get all of those design decisions for free, but you don't understand the background. This can lead to a case where you tweak or add something to your game which completely throws it off balance, without realizing it and without being able to fix it.