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.