You get better at designing your game (I swear)

Hi everyone and welcome to I Suck at Making Games (so you don’t have to). For the first official article, I thought I’d start with some motivational content, sharing something I realized recently looking at these past 2 years designing games and beyond. The lesson is: you get better at designing your own game. I know it sounds obvious, and it probably is, but I’m not trying to share a great lesson to revolutionize your workflow or your process. The point I’m trying to make is more on an emotional level: endure the difficulties at the beginning because in time you will master the entities that make up your project. But what do I mean by that?

Physics

Let’s start with my past as a student. I graduated in Physics some years ago, and I was always amazed, during my classes, about the quantity of numbers, experiments and real life examples: very very few. It probably depends on the university, or the fact that I focused on theoretical Physics, but the point is that every exam went more or less like this: “In this course we’ll talk about X. We describe X though this mathematical model. Learn this model as you learned addition and multiplication”. For every exam you had to rewire your brain to understand new letters and symbols that behaved in their own unique way with one another. Those symbols represented physical entities and complicated concepts, but at the end of the course, you mastered them as if they were second nature. Once you master these elements, you can use them to describe any physical situation in that field, even if you haven’t faced it before, because you now have the tools to reframe it in the mathematical model.

Beats

Back to game design, I’m currently making a rhythm game. This involves thinking in terms of beats instead of seconds or frames. Initially, everything seemed confused and ambiguous as we were making our first steps in this project. 5 months later, while working on a boss fight, I have to select when the boss will attack along a musical track, and I find myself intuitively knowing what’s the appropriate amount of beats to prepare the player to dodge the attack, the appropriate duration of the attacks and even the appropriate downtime to keep the pacing high. But those attacks were almost completely new and never met before in the game, so it’s not like I had memorised the appropriate times and distances. I was simply more used to the formal entities that make up my game, thus speeding up the process. Obviously testing is a part of game design, so for some attacks I had to iterate more than once, but the point still stands: you get better at making your own game. 

Search algorithm

I wanted to tie this concept with something I found in this beautiful video I watched about game design.

I highly suggest watching it but I will briefly summarise it: game design is a process in which you try to find the best experience for your player, as if on a boat you were trying to find the deepest point of a lake. A prototype/playtest corresponds to measuring the depth of a point in the lake. The smart captain doesn't go in a single direction but tries different paths in the beginning and then follows the most promising. Every time there’s indecision, the captain has to once again scan his surroundings to decide the new course of action. 

How does this tie with what I said in this article? Well, as you explore the lake, you discover all the points that are not deep enough, i.e. all the things that don’t work within your games. But also, more importantly, you become a better captain of that ship, with a good hunch of where the best direction could be (note that it’s also important to test the game and question your assumptions with an open mind).

What do I do, how is this useful

In conclusion I wanna leave you with 2 main suggestions.

The first is to test your game often in the beginning. You’re not only making your game better, you are also making yourself better at designing it, learning how to manage its entities and the 100 ways in which your game doesn’t work. The second suggestion is don’t give up when in the beginning everything seems confusing and scary. Allow yourself the time to learn, starting with the core of your game and then building all the extra aspects one at the time. It’s not uncommon to feel frustrated when after weeks of work you have to change many parts of your game. Accept it as a part of the journey that makes both you and your game better.

That's all for today, see you next week, when we'll all be better captains of our ship.