Game Developers Are Doing It All Wrong

we spend a lot of time talking about making the game how to make a box move how to go through a wall how to make something die Etc but we don't spend a lot of time talking about the design of your game because I feel like we kind of gloss over it and a lot of us as programmers don't have very much skills in design so I guess I'm asking is there any resources that you would recommend to getting into design because I I have a strong opinion that design should be the foundation of your game and then you should start with everything else game design like the loop and the mechanics correct because it's you know yes yeah I I I agree that it should be foundational to to the gamees creation I I don't have any resources and the the thing is is that the only resource I can think of is playing the games that you're passionate about and then writing out exactly what they do that that for me is has been really really helpful so I'm like obsessed with I don't know why I just love madness Returns I love that

game and I love the Zelda franchise and those games are kind of similar in their Mechanics for me I just understand that genre and so there's no reason personally for me to read a book on game design when I'm like I don't want to make I don't want to make a like a Dark Souls game I I don't want to make because I just frankly don't like those games right so I'm going to have a better understanding I think it was Stephen King who said if you want to write books you need to read so the best way to have a good understanding of game design and the people I found who are the smartest with game design design to the people who are really passionate about playing a certain genre so I like one of my friends Jason he made cultic I had a call with him today um I just said dude there's certain game design stuff that are really screwing with me for Twisted Tower and I just picked his brain CU he understands Shooters and so he just gave me a layout of all these amazing game design principles and it's just because he loves Shooters right he's been playing Shooters I think since he was born for me I didn't play that many shooters growing up so I sort of Le leaned on him and his passion for

certain games um regarding your question about game design needing to be the foundation before you actually make your game I 100% agree with this the problem with this though and I talked to Jay Armstrong the creative Cult of the Lamb about this the problem with this is that a lot of times no matter how hard you try to predict a game design element being fun or being balanced there's no real way for you to know until you build it and then keep it or scrap it and then build something else and keep it or scrap it and so that's why lately and I have a video coming out about this I've been saying that feature creep is not always a bad thing because feature creep allows you to experiment with various mechanics and actually have a better understanding of what's fun and what's not you can try and predict all you want your your your gameplay Loop um and your mechanics and try and use all the best game design principles that you've learned but until you put them in your game you never really know if they're fun right so the answer to your question

is uh play lots of games replicate the games you love with the mechanics you're creating and then you got to experiment and it's going to take time and it's going to mean that you trash things that you spent months working on does that make sense oh no I absolutely agree I think I'm on my seventh duration of games and features that I've tried yeah but yeah no thank you and you also hit on another very important note which is I'm talking to people that absolutely love that genre uh that's something that I do but not consciously and I think that's I I should do more of that speaking to I'm making an RPG by the way so people that like absolutely love term-based RPGs because they will have Insight yeah and if you asked me and I'm glad you didn't ask about RPGs because you would have embarrassed me I don't care about those games so I'm not the right person to ask right but I think it's number one Really Brave of you to be able to do this call and just hop on and ask me questions so you're obviously making the Right Moves In the industry of trying to connect with people and talk to people so I think that's great just yeah like you said try and talk to people who are not necessarily Pros like

one person I lean on the most is my brother he doesn't make games but he plays games he plays lots of games and he he loves the kind of games I love and so if I say hey man come play this game it's similar to Bioshock he's going to play it and instead of giving me these principles of game design he's going to say well actually Bioshock does this and Bioshock does that and Bioshock does this and it's such simple bite-sized chunks of information that are much more easy to consume than a book about game design granted a book about game design would be incredible I just think it's probably better for us to just get to know people who are passionate about a specific genre yeah agreed I don't like reading anyway so I like I like your answer that's awesome all right cool well good luck with your game Ed that's awesome to talk to you all right thanks Thomas you have a good one yeah hey friend I want to see you succeed as a game developer I want to see you make a full-time salary as a game developer see the thing is most game developers don't know how to actually make money with their game and

believe it or not you can actually make a full-time salary with just a demo I've done this three freaking times and I'm going to teach you exactly how to do that make a full-time salary with just a demo click the link below it's a webinar totally free no gimmicks here check it out watch the whole thing you're going to learn a ton and you're going to learn how to make six figures with just a demo cheers