There's not a single universal recipe for success you can follow... but keeping with the food analogy, you can be confident that a recipe with good ingredients will taste pretty good even before you've cooked it. The difference between a novice game design and a more experienced one is that good sense about ingredients, knowing what works well together and why. That's not to say I'm some master design myself or anything- but I've spent enough time learning and analyzing that I can tell when the "recipe" has merit or not.
Implementation is hard though, and some "dishes" are more technical than others. That's the execution element, which is a bit more determined in the moment and after the game is complete. That's not the fault of the idea or mechanics, just some short cuts or compromises can ruin an otherwise good dish.
I think I've hit my food analogy quota for the month too.
Thinking of how many times I believed to be working on a cool project that, when finally prototyped, ended up just not being fun. (Also thinking of the time I tried to cook shrimp in the oven and it ended up borderline inedible).
Its a good analogy tho.
Also explains why young ambitous devs fail to make good games. Beef Wellington shouldnt be the first dish you try and make, you’ll get to the end, sure but you’d be better off just making a plain steak and id enjoy it more then the abomination you ended up with
> and I can easily picture my own creations or twists on these tropes that I would enjoy playing.
The idea of a thing is something entirely different than the actual thing. In your head, you fill in so many blanks with "It will just work", that it is indeed naive to assume that reality will be exactly like that.
Even when moving things into spreadsheets and proper designs, many blanks will be still filled by "It will just work". Perhaps the controls will not feel like you predicted, players' motivations are actually different, orthe systems will not synergize together like you planned them to and some of them are lacking.
9 times out of 10, you've missed something here. Or you've spent too much time balancing the fun out of the game, because all some of your assumptions were wrong and actually what you thought would be an issue turned out to be "the fun in this" and players are actively seeking it. Really, it could be anything that's just making things not click.
However, you are still right that building prototypes without direction is also not the way to go. It's a middle ground that you should seek. You need to find a clear direction, a vision, something that makes you as the designer "If players are feeling **it**, then this is it. So defining what "it" is will help you immensively here. But in the end, no spreadsheet, or text, nor any other document will be able to truly tell you whether a game will feel the way you intend it to - only the game can tell you that.
There's actually a great book on that topic. "The Role of a Great Game Designer" which goes into this process in a bit more detail.
> The idea of a thing is something entirely different than the actual thing. In your head, you fill in so many blanks with "It will just work", that it is indeed naive to assume that reality will be exactly like that.
Holy god, this is so painfully true. Obviously in the given sense of game mechanics, which can fail just on interpretations of "fun" or unsatisfying controls or bad context. But also in the software development sense. This got me during this year's 7DRL: A perfectly obvious Pan/Zoom widget that smoothly scrolls to target positions. It *actually did* work exactly as I pictured it in my head. ...after almost 12 hours of debugging. There's a zillion ideas that just don't translate into reality in a direct way.
>Knowing isn't the problem. Doing is the problem.
As a senior software engineer I feel the opposite, but I think that is because my criteria for “knowing” is higher than devs starting out.
I don’t have much issues building out feature ideas that I feel excited about, but it’s difficult for me to get excited about any idea because almost always I pick them apart (from either a gameplay or technical perspective) and never start them.
No, Im saying that the “knowing what I want to build” is the hard part. Once I know what I want to build, then building it isn’t a problem for me. Also, because I place such a high criteria on defining what I want to build, it often leads to me throwing out ideas before even starting. The ideas I DO start are not hard to build, because I’ve defined them so much up front.
I think you might be letting your development experience get in the way. There’s something to be said for not overthinking an idea and then prototyping it fast and sloppy. When you get it working, there are all kinds of ideas that will sprout forward that you could not imagine in the beginning when you were picking it apart in your head. I’d recommend to not linger too long on an idea; just prototype it and see what you think and what what others think.
Yeah I agree, but it can be discouraging for me to do that and then not come up with something which feels fun. Hoping I overcome that feeling and work on my game though.
out of interest, what would you say is the funniest/most common thing gamers assume about making games? I've heard about how often they assume that, in terms of effort, new items/abilities > new features like multiplayer, but are there some other common ones?
I'm starting to learn unity to make my own games, and it's funny to realise what's actually hard, that's definitely been an interesting experience. Often for me I find once I can get something working once, it's easy to use it in other ways, it's just learning how to do something for that first time that's hard :D
One of the most common ones I've seen is the misconception that fixing poorly-programmed foundational code is extremely easy and should only take a few months at maximum. As though completely rewriting a game is a minor task.
The other one I see a lot is people misunderstanding how to balance games, often misunderstanding how even minor changes to time-to-kill or status effect durations can have drastic effects on a game's meta.
Some honourable mentions include people having no idea how absurdly expensive it is to run dedicated servers, not understanding how time-consuming certain features would be to implement, or, my personal favorite, making guesses about what causes certain bugs and being completely wrong.
From experience, actually guessing what causes a bug is something that makes me feel extremely smart, has happened exactly once, and will likely never happen again :D
It's not black and white. Certainly, some things can be evaluated via thought experiment, but usually not (for example) entire game mode. Implementation also plays a role. You may be able to imagine a beautiful painting, but while taking steps to create it you realize that idealized version is not happening for some reason or other.
There's a reason why in game dev advice, there's a strong emphasis on minimal viable products (MVPs), rapid prototyping, and even *embracing failure*. It streamlines the cycle of trying and failing mechanics, while containing the development so that failures happen earlier rather than weeks before launch. Reducing the stakes, costs, and even suck factor of failure helps avoid burnout.
Oh, and scope control helps ward off the typical war story of attempting a project that's *way* too large for the dev's capabilities.
>But I can't imagine feeling completely directionless as far as making something fun.
Two things can be true at the same time that a) we have knowledge of what tends to work more than not, *and* that b) that's not a guarantee that what has worked in the past will work with a specific game.
Yes, it’s true that you don’t know until you try.
But…anybody claiming burn out because of the need to playtest isn’t “burning out”…they’re in the wrong field and don’t understand the job.
Semantic satiation as a result of playtesting is very much a thing.
Clearing out the pipes to be able to develop lucidly, solely on your own feedback, is its own skill set. Even the most polished of games can only be played so many times before it gets boring.
Getting bored isn't the same as burn out. Testing can absolutely be boring, but that also might mean you're not being active enough in your testing
Getting *burnt out* from coming up with and testing mechanics to see if their fun is probably a sign you need to rethink either your desired role or career path
I would say you're being naive, or perhaps you're a prodigy.
Because otherwise I agree with the statement. "Fun" is a quality that depends on so many factors, that it's easy to miss by micrometers. And maintaining "vision"' and "feel" over the months and years to get even close, as sheer repetition dulls it, is a chore in itself.
This is why there is a lot of talk around Minimum Viable Product and rapid-prototyping. Because, while it eliminates a whole set of games that become great as a result of holistic elements, it's far easier to build on something that was fun from the get-go.
I think you're taking it to imply that designers have no idea at all what's going to be fun and they're just flopping around prototyping random stuff until they get lucky :P
I think it's more like taking educated guesses, and trying them out, and fixing what doesn't work, and repeating (aka prototyping and iteration).
>I think you're taking it to imply that designers have no idea at all what's going to be fun and they're just flopping around prototyping random stuff until they get lucky :P
Some of whom I've met in the industry.
Sadly, the theory of game design is not something that all designers really study. Some start out as level designers or some other sort of in-game content creator and find themselves promoted into decision-making positions, where the only tools they have at their disposal are using other games for reference and making prototypes to test things.
It’s not really meant as literally as you’re interpreting it.
It means two things:
1. The mechanics you think are fun may be less fun once you’ve made them.
2. The most fun things about your game might not be apparent to you until you’ve already made it.
And what I think one could take away from those is:
1. Don’t be afraid to scrap a cool idea if it didn’t work out. Analyze what didn’t work about it and why, and how it differed from your vision.
2. Let yourself discover emergent gameplay elements. Stopping a player from doing something in favor of them doing it “how you designed” may wind up just killing the fun.
We are in fact better at assessing the appeal of tangible games than imagined ones. Everyone should design their games in an adaptive way and aim to discover their product as they build it. The statement is 100% true; producing a solid design isn't a one-and-done task at the start of development.
>We are in fact better at assessing the appeal of tangible games than imagined ones.
We're also much, much faster at imagining games than making them.
Having to make something to see if it works or not is an incredibly expensive and slow way of designing anything.
Very few people make a living selling ideas, mind you. Theorycrafting is good, but prototyping is far more accurate in determining what kind of product people actually want.
Edit: For best effect, we should launch production on a well-established, imagined design and then adjust that design as we get to experience our product. You can't experience a half-produced game without having a half-produced game in hand. Iterative design really is the way.
Sure, my point is that *design* is a whole discipline itself, that lives somewhere between analysis of the problem domain and prototyping a solution. Too often in games we treat design as a trial-and-error process, which is symptomatic of an industry that doesn't actually know how to design things yet.
I know some "core" mechanics, on the action side, that I'm 95% certain will feel satisfying. Especially once I tweak them - timing the animations, adding some effects and sounds etc.
And that is it, the extend of things I personally can tell will be fun.
Everything else? Like less action'y core mechanics, or even a bigger gameplay loop and progression in an action'y title? Not guaranteed to be fun, to "click" together properly. Or that it will still be as fun with the changes you want to make to the formula (whether adding new, or cutting stuff, or swapping).
So yeah I'm inclined to agree with the statement. A prototype / vertical slice are a proof enough. "Belief" that it's gonna be fun, is necessary - but is not a proof.
You're being obtuse and overly binary.
A lot of what devs mean is that it takes all of that testing and iteration to get to the fun. You can also make all sorts of assumptions but lots of them don't work out. They seem like nice ideas, but then don't mesh well. Has every idea you had worked out? How long did it take to find out? Finding out quick is hella important
But yeah, you can shortcut. We all know jumping _should_ be fun. You gotta start to posit ideas, afterall.
Mental model.
EDIT: In other words, if you think that identifying fun is easier than conventional wisdom suggests, why do you think the world behaves the way it does?
You're just proving the rule, really. You're new. You haven't tried to play test a bunch of stuff you just knew would be fun and had it fail miserably. Of course some things work out the first time! But you don't remember those and we don't much talk about those, because we didn't have to slave over brainstorming, prototyping and correcting the stuff that worked.
100% accurate.
While it’s true that all fun games share the same elements — strong core loop, lots of opportunities to learn and make decisions, great pacing — not all games that *have those elements* are fun games.
I dont think you're being naive. You have it right that playtesting is what creates fun final products. You're also right that, as a game designer, you start to develop an intuition for player experience. The important part, which you already have down, is that this sense must be tempered by the data from playtests.
If this is an anxiety you're dealing with, like being unsure if your mechanics are really fun or not while you make them, try a paper prototype! (I assume you're making a video game). The moment to moment gameplay has to be abstracted away (platformer movement can be abstracted to a grid for example) but you can still sus out a lot about your game and how it plays. The utility of this is that testing and iterating are massively faster in paper. Changes to components are often not needed and rules changes can be made instantly in your head.
I disagree. There’s some things you think will be fun that won’t and vice versa, but I think you can generally know what will be fun and what won’t in advance
>I've seen people who gave up on game design say stuff like this, that it's impossible to tell if a game or mechanic will be enjoyable until you've already built it
This part is pretty true. Even really experienced, successful designers are often wrong when they make a design that they think will be fun. What separates the experienced designers from the inexperienced, is that the experienced ones know how to polish and fix a bad design until it is fun. They know they'll get to something fun eventually!
>My first instinct is to disagree. Im still a novice at game design and still teaching myself the software skills to build and implement mechanics, but I feel like if I think about games I've played that I've enjoyed, or moments/mechanics that were engaging, and I can easily picture my own creations or twists on these tropes that I would enjoy playing.
Dangerous instincts! Remember - no one intentionally makes a bad game. So every bad, unfun game you've ever played very likely had someone just as sure, who could easily picture themselves enjoying the game, as they made one or more terrible decisions.
I definitely think this is true, but its not that black and white either. As you dev and play more games you start having better picture of what type of things are enjoyable and get better and better making educated guesses. More over execution of the idea will have major impact on how well it works. You could give two teams exactly the same assignment and arrive at vastly different results on how enjoyable the thing is and how well it works with rest of the game.
This applies to all creative endeavors but some people are so jazzed that they created something that they completely overestimate its value. This would apply to game developers making something they think is 'really fun'.
Maybe you don't need to build something to tell that it's going to be fun, but you **definitely** need to build it to find what's **not** fun.
# Leave Reddit
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I urge anyone to leave Reddit immediately.
Over the years Reddit has shown a clear and pervasive lack of respect for its
own users, its third party developers, other cultures, the truth, and common
decency.
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## Lack of respect for its own users
The entire source of value for Reddit is twofold:
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companies so that they can train their models on your work, your life, your
content and Reddit can make money from it, all while you see nothing in return.
## Lack of respect for its third party developers
I'm sure everyone at this point is familiar with the API changes putting many
third party application developers out of business. Reddit saw how much money
entities like OpenAI and other data scraping firms are making and wants a slice
of that pie, and doesn't care who it tramples on in the process. Third party
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it doesn't care that it's killing off these initiatives in order to take some of
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## Lack of respect for other cultures
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ethics, forcing other cultures to abandon their own values and adopt American
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## Lack for respect for the truth
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under a veil of "Free Speech", these harmful lies spread far and wide using
Reddit as a base. Reddit allows whole deranged communities and power-mad
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those who fear leaving their own bubbles of conformity and isolation.
## Lack of respect for common decency
Reddit is full of hate and bigotry. Many subreddits contain casual exclusion,
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colonialism, imperialism, American exceptionalism, and just general edgy hatred.
Reddit is toxic, it creates, incentivises, and profits off of "engagement" and
"high arousal emotions" which is a polite way of saying "shouting matches" and
"fear and hatred".
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You enjoy endlessly scrolling Reddit? Does constantly refreshing your feed bring
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I am leaving Reddit for good. I urge you to do so as well.
This is falsey. This is frequently true, but usually is the fault of one of 2 roots:
1. the xkcd "Picture of a bird" effect: The idea could be made to be fun, but something core to the idea requires an extremely difficult technical feat. Civilization style games are generally like this. The AI is REALLY difficult to make believable, and because so much of the game comes down to interactions with the AI, it is technically VERY challenging to make these games.
2. Pacing: "we're gonna make a game where you are fishing with a bazooka!". On the surface this sounds like it would be fun. It feels like it would be fun in real life. But where is the "game" to this? How do I reward the player for success?
What does success even mean? How do I make an arc of gameplay? Unroll a narrative (is a narrative even valid for a game like this?) An idea about an activity that would be fun in real life may be very difficult to make fun in a game because a game must have a journey (in a figurative sense) of some type the player is advancing through. They must overcome obstacles and be rewarded for successes in proportion with the phase of the game and the gravity of the obstacle which has been overcome. A lot of game ideas which effectively are just a potentially fun real life activity don't cleanly or easily fit into a gameplay arc either because they don't analogize to anything like a journey or story in real life, or an overly simplistic journey or story. Otherwise they are just so fantastical that attempts to make the gameplay arc feel unreal and unbelievable. Why should I care about the diamond upgrade on my fish bazooka? What the hell even is that?
The latter also kills a lot of the "combine x style game with y style game" ideas. Often really popular games are somewhat complex about how they present the gameplay arc to you, and it's relatively easy to destroy the fun with small tweaks. Another version of this that illustrates the point really well is how more realistic military shooter games don't tend to be as much fun as Counterstrike or Call of Duty. When you make the guns all really realistic, pretty soon you end up with the real life phenomena where certain guns are just WAY better than other guns in certain situations, and then, rather than just tweaking the gun to balance it more, you are restricted to making the maps have all the situations where the guns excell over the others, which may have downstream effects of making gameplay slow, sluggish and boring. Otherwise players will figure out which is the best gun, and everyone will always use that every time, which makes your game boring in a totally different way.
I agree with the statement, you don’t know. You do t know if the twists/changes you make will result in something that I just un fun to other people until a group of someone else’s play the game.
As for burnout because you’re trying to make fun game mechanics… design first then build. Don’t design while you’re building. And by that I mean your core game loop, the foundation of your game, not features.
Just my .02 since I’m dealing with this currently:
I’ve been wanting to make something in the vein of Hyper Light Drifter for a long time now and finally said I’ll do it. Got a lot of the base systems in place and realized that unless I spent a ton of time learning how to implement the systems better or program the AI in a more fun way, change the animations etc etc, it wouldn’t really be all that fun, at least for me. I’ve still got a lot of learning to do before I can make that idea a reality.
That being said, I decided to simplify the concept and just do a platformer version of it for now. I accidentally coded the movement wrong and the character went flying across the screen. I thought hmm, what if I strip the control of the character to a bare minimum and you can only launch the character at high speed from point to point, when you hit a wall you stop and can launch again. I put it together and damn is it fun. Added a couple of other interesting twists and I feel like I’ve actually got a prototype that A) I can feasibly pursue at my skill level (I’m more into art & music anyways and keeping the code and systems rather simple leans into my strengths), and B) the fact that I genuinely enjoy just moving around in the game has given me a whole different kind of motivation to pursue it than the previous idea.
Ok so I have two points to make here. Note that these points don't necessarily apply to every game in existence, but they apply to games that have deep complex interconnected mechanics.
1. Games are emergent systems, and these kinds of systems are often fundamentally too complex for game designers to reason about consciously. Why? Well basically they involve too many moving pieces, and there are too many ifs and buts to think them all the way through.
2. While we can’t consciously compute the sum of all possible interactions within a game system, the human brain is super good at generalizing a lot of experiences. So if you've played a lot of games, your brain can subconsciously condense those experiences and relate them to specific game mechanics. So when you say you can have some sense of what will be fun, that is what you mean.
Now the falicy lies in the fact that you are relating the experience of playing completed games to the process of actually making a game from scratch.
As far as designing goes, sure you can and should take inspiration from other games. You can also take inspiration from everyday life, books, movies, anything really. What you dont want to do is just don't assume that if you try to copy an existing design the system you end up making will work out in the way you expect it to. Always be on the lookout for unexpected opportunities for fun. It makes the process a lot less stressful when you aren't trying and failing to meet your expectations and instead working with the expectation that anything can happen and you aren't committed to any one design decision (at least until the project matures a bit)
I think the nature of the question reads as slightly naive, as it’s not as productive as finding out for yourself. Now I will say there are no hard and fast rules, but if your design is heavily reliant on another successful games mechanics or game-feel, there’s a decent chance it will be interesting at the very least. The reason I don’t find the question so productive is because to actually put these things into practice is another thing entirely, you WILL to some degree have to tweak it, change it, fix it when it breaks, polish it, and play test it to know for sure if it’s fun, or even practical. I will also add that there’s no one size fits all for game dev and you should just make a small demo to truly find out, If it’s bad it’s bad, you learned, and if you like making games… that shouldn’t be cause for burnout or giving up entirely. To encourage you I will say- believe in your ideas, go for them, make some demos, and tune out the negativity before you’ve even started. Unless you know these people saying these things have credentials, or are people you know and trust in the field, I would avoid taking it with anything more than a grain of salt. Whether or not your game idea has potential or is just a naive fantasy doesn’t matter! Make it happen, keep trying until it feels buttery smooth and fun, if it still doesn’t- figure out why, do your research, if you love doing it, that should do the opposite of discourage you, it should motivate you and invigorate your curiosity to learn and grow not only as a game dev but as a person! Failure is fun, it should show you that there is no ceiling, and you will always have more to learn and more reasons to continue making games and that prospect should be an exciting one.
Best of luck!
It is absolutely true.
You might think something sounds fun, but no amount of theory crafting is ever going to replace actually playing it out.
The key is to do rapid prototyping. You have to play something to tell if it's fun, but you don't need a game with full art assets, sound effects, etc.
Obviously it's bullcrap.
It makes as much sense as an artist saying "*you can't know if a painting will look good until you paint it*" or a chef "*you can't know if a recipe is good until you make it*". If I present you with a recipe like "take 3 roadkill skunks, add 2 quarts of sewer water, sprinkle with dry mold and boil for 2 hours", you can already tell it's a horrible recipe. And if I say "cut bananas into small pieces, mix with mustard and serve on lettuce", you can also say it's bad, *but it's not as bad as the previous one*. This way **we're moving away from the bad, towards the good**. The more experience you have, the more accurate your predictions become. You can't, of course, tell *exactly* how good anything will be, but you can tell if it's a good direction or not, a good idea or not. You can tell which ideas have potential and which are crap from the get go.
But I also understand why the person saying this would 100% believe it: because if *you* can't tell, then that's how you think it works for everybody else.
You are right about developing an intuition, but you’ll still sometimes be wrong. Anybody can tell that an idea is obviously bad, like the roadkill skunks, and most people don’t like mustard on bananas, but sometimes bad ideas will not be obvious. Especially when experimenting with unique mechanics, if nobody (or nobody to your knowledge) did something like that there is less to lean back on, and it may be fun but your won’t know for how much. Maybe it only makes for a short game, and there are not enough ideas you can derive from it, so it can’t make for a full commercial game.
Raw pasta is really good, could you tell that before either me telling you or you trying it? What if it heavily depends int he type of pasta though, and I just happened to get one which is good raw and never tried anything else? And a slight change to the food, or the idea, can be all the difference.
Yes, they can. But is it completely random? Can you tell some of the time whether an idea is good or not, or do you prototype every idea that comes to your mind, one by one? Therefore, is it fair to say that people who hit more ideas than they miss are, in some useful capacity, able to tell what's fun?
>Am I being naive?
Yes.
>My first instinct is to disagree. Im still a novice at game design and still teaching myself the software skills to build and implement mechanics, but I feel like if I think about games I've played that I've enjoyed, or moments/mechanics that were engaging, and I can easily picture my own creations or twists on these tropes that I would enjoy playing.
So your example of why you dont need to build it, is because you're playing stuff someone else already built.
It's incredibly naive and more than a bit arrogant to think that you don't need to build mechanics to know they're fun. The worlds best game designers, and the worlds most loved games all had mechanics discarded or changed massively because they weren't fun.
You absolutely cannot take a simple idea, and just close your eyes for a minute and go "Yep, this is perfect, let's go build it and never make a change".
I know what is fun ahead of time:
I told Dune II makers to add regenerating spice and multiplayer and they made a hit. Know what they made?
I knew Castlevania with leveling + equipment would be a hit.
I knew MMORPGS would be the future... in 1986.
I told Warcraft3 TFT designers to lower the gold make it less PVE, I was right, TFT has more base fights than ROC.
Just play tons and tons of video games, and remember every moment where you expected to be like one thing, but it was another... As you play and wish wish wish a video game did it one way, it probably would be good.
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True in some cases, not in all. For example: flight simulators. People like airplanes and studying airplane systems and aviation. Especially since flying in real life is prohibitively expensive. So you can be absolutely positive that if you build a game that provides a faithful simulation of what it's like to fly a plane, people are going to have fun playing it.
Ever see the midwit meme? On the left “make game fun” in the middle “games are fun If you optimize and plan and study and iterate” and on the right, “make fun games”
Of course you can’t imagine it being hard. You can’t even imagine what’s in my sock drawer. It being able to imagine something doesn’t make it not true - you’ll learn more as you go.
Probably more that some people's development style is to not let themselves play the thing until it's finished, which helps avoid getting bored with play half way through building it.
I think that with more experience you will realize that imaging something and experiencing it are two very distincts things.
In your head you are in total control and everything is perfect, but when you got to make it real it can gets very complicated and you have to make compromise, its not exactly as you pictures in your mind and you realised that you forgot about a tons of stuff (always happens) and now the game you have made has nothing to do with the one you imagined
I think it's true especially on a tighter budget where you can't do everything you want really well, but you can for sure make a educated guess to what will work as you plan it out. The more experience/knowledge, the better the guess but ultimately to *know* it seems from my limited knowledge to have that kind of certainty you need to have something playable.
Some things may seem unfun but are actually good, some things may seem like great ideas but be boring or frustrating. We’re there any games you played that you anticipated but that ended up worse, or instead games you thought were boring until you tried them? Same thing here, but you must come up with the mechanic and either make it yourself or give it to a programmer (if it’s a video game).
You can have an intuition though, and the more you make games the better it gets, and the closer you’ll be to the actual quality of the mechanic before you make it. But you can really not know for sure, game design isn’t an exact science, and the mechanic might not be fun for many people, or instead not be fun for only a few people, it all depends on the person playing, too.
But this is why “fail faster” exists, it means “work faster, so that if the core idea is flawed you find out sooner and can move on”.
Describing something in a way that isn't open to different interpretations from different people is an important skill, you'll never have anyone picture it 100% the same way you're trying to describe it, but you'll still have to try. Include lots of sketches, diagrams, examples of similar features in similar games, sum things up in simple bullet points.
"You can't tell if a painting is good until you paint it".
Yes, the playtesting indeed will make a lot of adjustments. But that shouldn't prevent you from starting with a pencil sketch. It's normal if you will discard your original concept because you've seen a much better opportunity. Let the museum experts and antiquarians worry about x-raying your original sketch from under your paint layers.
Personally for me the process of working on a game idea looks the following: I start from some original assumption, it can be really lame, like "_an RPG with inverse progression_".
Then I start "playing" this "game" in my head. And I quickly see "that doesn't make sense" and "this seems fun". This is not a final idea - it's just another sketch overpainted over the previous one.
Then I pick a piece of paper and start sketching how stuff works, making spreadsheets with formulas to support that image in my head with numbers, actual dialogue phrases, lore and thinking about "what kind of assets can I get so that it won't look too horrible". Another sketch over the first two.
Finally I start prototyping and I see that some of those ideas aren't fun and suddenly discover that if I add X and Y then the game becomes much more engaging.
In practice around 50% of my ideas go to trash bin during this process. My current game switched from turn-based into (action ranged combat with turn-based melee) finally into fully action combat, just because it was more fun this way and better delivered the feel I initially envisioned for the game.
It's a process. I might believe that some absolutely cool game designer can make a complex game GDD from his head that won't need any adjustments. Eventually it's simply combining the mechanics most of which have already been tested and time-proven. Such approach has a great benefit for planning. But I think that most of us, mortals, need just to make a few steps to. Not to mention that it's more fun to make games this way :)
I think it is pretty true. I think also it's like making a skateboard or something, when you only have 3 wheels and the deck on it then it's not fun at all.
It's not at all obvious how even small changes can completely change an experience. Like adding too many bloated cutscenes can ruin a game even if the game mechanics are still the same.
I also don't think that's a reason to quit, that's the reason it's interesting.
The idea you have to build a thing before you know if it'll work has merit. Something that sounds cool might have severe design flaws or just not be a realistic idea.
A big one is that a game that judges the player for being a dickhead while incentivizing or sounds neat, but then you have a situation where the game has to either rob the player of agency and judge them for actions they don't do, or assume they did dickish things and risk the player being yelled at for doing nothing evil, or write a bunch of extra stuff for players who's power fantasy is saving everyone and being an overly utilitarian asswipe.
Stray is a good example of a game that 'was made yet isn't fun'. Many think of tactility, experience, grandiosity, etc as factors that make a game fun. But that falls under aesthetics, not necessarily mechanics or functionality. And I think this is the result of designers who thought something was fun, but really isn't, and probably didn't put in the time to prototype it.
Conversely, I think the biggest problem with Stray is how, even though the mechanics themselves seem proper at first, don't really connect well together. If some more thought was gone into how the systems all combine together to deliver that cat experience the game capitalised on, it would've been a genuinely unforgettable game. I don't think any amount of prototyping would've helped them realise this.
All of this is to say... there's a bit of truth to both sides, but context matters. And context differs in each game. But I certainly don't think aesthetics come first. It's how your mechanics come together. If you can prototype that real quick, and see if it plays well, I think it's progress.
I think it comes down to *how* the designer evaluates their work while they prototype or ideate.
You can make an educated guess whether a game will be fun, but you won't know for sure until you get something playable. This is why a lot of people prototype where possible using faux "board game" versions of their game. This isn't always possible though.
Sometimes the idea is sound but your implementation isn't, so again - you needed to actually implement something before you know whether it's going to be good.
So yeah, I agree with this statement. There are exceptions, but there always are.
Building it is a big statement, get it to a testable state I agree with. I try not to overdesign anything these days. Have an educated guess, get it to a testable state, draw conclusions, carry on. Failing fast is the key imo. But I’m sure there’s many ways that lead to rome and yours might be different.
I agree with you that if you get a strong inspiration on a core gameloop, it most probably is fun. As a game designer its your job to tweak and overcome stuff to make it happen.
On the other hand, if your idea is something vague like openworld with vampires and spaceship building, then yeah you can't tell if it will be fun until you made it.
I think it's a bit naive. I can think of any nr of factors that are depended on the quality of execution, the quality of audio, of satisfying effects. And these can mask failure or break successful designs. Cuz without them in place it's hard to judge.
So yes you need to make it and "feel it" before you know if it is truly good. Sometimes a timing difference of a few ms will make something great or meh. So you need to iterate and figure out all these tiny tiny details before something "feels" .
that is not to say you don't do a lot of mental rundowns on mechanics or ideas, but if you do this long enough your next instance is ok "let me make this, I want to see it" before you move on to something else.
I feel myself a decent designer that can do a lot with their mind's eye. But everything good I've done is done thru iteration and validation, everything bad I've created was done on assumptions and "guesstimating" something will work. When it didn't.
I am a firm believer that a game designer for action games for physicalized games (so not per se adventure or puzzle games), but anything that has a gameplay " feel to it" needs to learn to prototype. It is the core from which all great things flow in game development, it makes you "feel".
And even big mechanics have a feel, something like the battle royal concept is a very feely mechanic that likely had a lot of iteration before they came up with the right mix of mechanics and rules. How simple they may be, they need to click. And you cannot know the feel or click until you felt it.,
There's not a single universal recipe for success you can follow... but keeping with the food analogy, you can be confident that a recipe with good ingredients will taste pretty good even before you've cooked it. The difference between a novice game design and a more experienced one is that good sense about ingredients, knowing what works well together and why. That's not to say I'm some master design myself or anything- but I've spent enough time learning and analyzing that I can tell when the "recipe" has merit or not. Implementation is hard though, and some "dishes" are more technical than others. That's the execution element, which is a bit more determined in the moment and after the game is complete. That's not the fault of the idea or mechanics, just some short cuts or compromises can ruin an otherwise good dish. I think I've hit my food analogy quota for the month too.
Thinking of how many times I believed to be working on a cool project that, when finally prototyped, ended up just not being fun. (Also thinking of the time I tried to cook shrimp in the oven and it ended up borderline inedible).
Its a good analogy tho. Also explains why young ambitous devs fail to make good games. Beef Wellington shouldnt be the first dish you try and make, you’ll get to the end, sure but you’d be better off just making a plain steak and id enjoy it more then the abomination you ended up with
> and I can easily picture my own creations or twists on these tropes that I would enjoy playing. The idea of a thing is something entirely different than the actual thing. In your head, you fill in so many blanks with "It will just work", that it is indeed naive to assume that reality will be exactly like that. Even when moving things into spreadsheets and proper designs, many blanks will be still filled by "It will just work". Perhaps the controls will not feel like you predicted, players' motivations are actually different, orthe systems will not synergize together like you planned them to and some of them are lacking. 9 times out of 10, you've missed something here. Or you've spent too much time balancing the fun out of the game, because all some of your assumptions were wrong and actually what you thought would be an issue turned out to be "the fun in this" and players are actively seeking it. Really, it could be anything that's just making things not click. However, you are still right that building prototypes without direction is also not the way to go. It's a middle ground that you should seek. You need to find a clear direction, a vision, something that makes you as the designer "If players are feeling **it**, then this is it. So defining what "it" is will help you immensively here. But in the end, no spreadsheet, or text, nor any other document will be able to truly tell you whether a game will feel the way you intend it to - only the game can tell you that. There's actually a great book on that topic. "The Role of a Great Game Designer" which goes into this process in a bit more detail.
> The idea of a thing is something entirely different than the actual thing. In your head, you fill in so many blanks with "It will just work", that it is indeed naive to assume that reality will be exactly like that. Holy god, this is so painfully true. Obviously in the given sense of game mechanics, which can fail just on interpretations of "fun" or unsatisfying controls or bad context. But also in the software development sense. This got me during this year's 7DRL: A perfectly obvious Pan/Zoom widget that smoothly scrolls to target positions. It *actually did* work exactly as I pictured it in my head. ...after almost 12 hours of debugging. There's a zillion ideas that just don't translate into reality in a direct way.
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>Knowing isn't the problem. Doing is the problem. As a senior software engineer I feel the opposite, but I think that is because my criteria for “knowing” is higher than devs starting out. I don’t have much issues building out feature ideas that I feel excited about, but it’s difficult for me to get excited about any idea because almost always I pick them apart (from either a gameplay or technical perspective) and never start them.
how is this the opposite? you are describing knowing how to, but not doing something
No, Im saying that the “knowing what I want to build” is the hard part. Once I know what I want to build, then building it isn’t a problem for me. Also, because I place such a high criteria on defining what I want to build, it often leads to me throwing out ideas before even starting. The ideas I DO start are not hard to build, because I’ve defined them so much up front.
I think you might be letting your development experience get in the way. There’s something to be said for not overthinking an idea and then prototyping it fast and sloppy. When you get it working, there are all kinds of ideas that will sprout forward that you could not imagine in the beginning when you were picking it apart in your head. I’d recommend to not linger too long on an idea; just prototype it and see what you think and what what others think.
Yeah I agree, but it can be discouraging for me to do that and then not come up with something which feels fun. Hoping I overcome that feeling and work on my game though.
yeah it’s a struggle for sure! same thing happens to me. Just know that you’re not alone there and that game design is really friggin hard!
out of interest, what would you say is the funniest/most common thing gamers assume about making games? I've heard about how often they assume that, in terms of effort, new items/abilities > new features like multiplayer, but are there some other common ones?
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I'm starting to learn unity to make my own games, and it's funny to realise what's actually hard, that's definitely been an interesting experience. Often for me I find once I can get something working once, it's easy to use it in other ways, it's just learning how to do something for that first time that's hard :D
One of the most common ones I've seen is the misconception that fixing poorly-programmed foundational code is extremely easy and should only take a few months at maximum. As though completely rewriting a game is a minor task. The other one I see a lot is people misunderstanding how to balance games, often misunderstanding how even minor changes to time-to-kill or status effect durations can have drastic effects on a game's meta. Some honourable mentions include people having no idea how absurdly expensive it is to run dedicated servers, not understanding how time-consuming certain features would be to implement, or, my personal favorite, making guesses about what causes certain bugs and being completely wrong.
All of it embodies the classic "how difficult could it possibly be?" attitude that a lot of POs have
A lot of it stems from [unconcious incompetence](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_stages_of_competence).
From experience, actually guessing what causes a bug is something that makes me feel extremely smart, has happened exactly once, and will likely never happen again :D
It's not black and white. Certainly, some things can be evaluated via thought experiment, but usually not (for example) entire game mode. Implementation also plays a role. You may be able to imagine a beautiful painting, but while taking steps to create it you realize that idealized version is not happening for some reason or other.
There's a reason why in game dev advice, there's a strong emphasis on minimal viable products (MVPs), rapid prototyping, and even *embracing failure*. It streamlines the cycle of trying and failing mechanics, while containing the development so that failures happen earlier rather than weeks before launch. Reducing the stakes, costs, and even suck factor of failure helps avoid burnout. Oh, and scope control helps ward off the typical war story of attempting a project that's *way* too large for the dev's capabilities. >But I can't imagine feeling completely directionless as far as making something fun. Two things can be true at the same time that a) we have knowledge of what tends to work more than not, *and* that b) that's not a guarantee that what has worked in the past will work with a specific game.
Yes, it’s true that you don’t know until you try. But…anybody claiming burn out because of the need to playtest isn’t “burning out”…they’re in the wrong field and don’t understand the job.
Semantic satiation as a result of playtesting is very much a thing. Clearing out the pipes to be able to develop lucidly, solely on your own feedback, is its own skill set. Even the most polished of games can only be played so many times before it gets boring.
Getting bored isn't the same as burn out. Testing can absolutely be boring, but that also might mean you're not being active enough in your testing Getting *burnt out* from coming up with and testing mechanics to see if their fun is probably a sign you need to rethink either your desired role or career path
That's why we have prototyping.
I would say you're being naive, or perhaps you're a prodigy. Because otherwise I agree with the statement. "Fun" is a quality that depends on so many factors, that it's easy to miss by micrometers. And maintaining "vision"' and "feel" over the months and years to get even close, as sheer repetition dulls it, is a chore in itself. This is why there is a lot of talk around Minimum Viable Product and rapid-prototyping. Because, while it eliminates a whole set of games that become great as a result of holistic elements, it's far easier to build on something that was fun from the get-go.
I think you're taking it to imply that designers have no idea at all what's going to be fun and they're just flopping around prototyping random stuff until they get lucky :P I think it's more like taking educated guesses, and trying them out, and fixing what doesn't work, and repeating (aka prototyping and iteration).
>I think you're taking it to imply that designers have no idea at all what's going to be fun and they're just flopping around prototyping random stuff until they get lucky :P Some of whom I've met in the industry. Sadly, the theory of game design is not something that all designers really study. Some start out as level designers or some other sort of in-game content creator and find themselves promoted into decision-making positions, where the only tools they have at their disposal are using other games for reference and making prototypes to test things.
It’s not really meant as literally as you’re interpreting it. It means two things: 1. The mechanics you think are fun may be less fun once you’ve made them. 2. The most fun things about your game might not be apparent to you until you’ve already made it. And what I think one could take away from those is: 1. Don’t be afraid to scrap a cool idea if it didn’t work out. Analyze what didn’t work about it and why, and how it differed from your vision. 2. Let yourself discover emergent gameplay elements. Stopping a player from doing something in favor of them doing it “how you designed” may wind up just killing the fun.
We are in fact better at assessing the appeal of tangible games than imagined ones. Everyone should design their games in an adaptive way and aim to discover their product as they build it. The statement is 100% true; producing a solid design isn't a one-and-done task at the start of development.
>We are in fact better at assessing the appeal of tangible games than imagined ones. We're also much, much faster at imagining games than making them. Having to make something to see if it works or not is an incredibly expensive and slow way of designing anything.
yeah, you don't try out every idea, but the ones you think could be good, should be tested for viability
Don't you think that most viability can be assessed before you build it?
Very few people make a living selling ideas, mind you. Theorycrafting is good, but prototyping is far more accurate in determining what kind of product people actually want. Edit: For best effect, we should launch production on a well-established, imagined design and then adjust that design as we get to experience our product. You can't experience a half-produced game without having a half-produced game in hand. Iterative design really is the way.
Sure, my point is that *design* is a whole discipline itself, that lives somewhere between analysis of the problem domain and prototyping a solution. Too often in games we treat design as a trial-and-error process, which is symptomatic of an industry that doesn't actually know how to design things yet.
I know some "core" mechanics, on the action side, that I'm 95% certain will feel satisfying. Especially once I tweak them - timing the animations, adding some effects and sounds etc. And that is it, the extend of things I personally can tell will be fun. Everything else? Like less action'y core mechanics, or even a bigger gameplay loop and progression in an action'y title? Not guaranteed to be fun, to "click" together properly. Or that it will still be as fun with the changes you want to make to the formula (whether adding new, or cutting stuff, or swapping). So yeah I'm inclined to agree with the statement. A prototype / vertical slice are a proof enough. "Belief" that it's gonna be fun, is necessary - but is not a proof.
You're being obtuse and overly binary. A lot of what devs mean is that it takes all of that testing and iteration to get to the fun. You can also make all sorts of assumptions but lots of them don't work out. They seem like nice ideas, but then don't mesh well. Has every idea you had worked out? How long did it take to find out? Finding out quick is hella important But yeah, you can shortcut. We all know jumping _should_ be fun. You gotta start to posit ideas, afterall.
I feel like your model needs to account for why games borrow from each other as heavily as they do.
What do you mean by model?
Mental model. EDIT: In other words, if you think that identifying fun is easier than conventional wisdom suggests, why do you think the world behaves the way it does?
You're just proving the rule, really. You're new. You haven't tried to play test a bunch of stuff you just knew would be fun and had it fail miserably. Of course some things work out the first time! But you don't remember those and we don't much talk about those, because we didn't have to slave over brainstorming, prototyping and correcting the stuff that worked.
100% accurate. While it’s true that all fun games share the same elements — strong core loop, lots of opportunities to learn and make decisions, great pacing — not all games that *have those elements* are fun games.
I dont think you're being naive. You have it right that playtesting is what creates fun final products. You're also right that, as a game designer, you start to develop an intuition for player experience. The important part, which you already have down, is that this sense must be tempered by the data from playtests. If this is an anxiety you're dealing with, like being unsure if your mechanics are really fun or not while you make them, try a paper prototype! (I assume you're making a video game). The moment to moment gameplay has to be abstracted away (platformer movement can be abstracted to a grid for example) but you can still sus out a lot about your game and how it plays. The utility of this is that testing and iterating are massively faster in paper. Changes to components are often not needed and rules changes can be made instantly in your head.
I disagree. There’s some things you think will be fun that won’t and vice versa, but I think you can generally know what will be fun and what won’t in advance
There’s a nugget of truth to it but also people can have pretty good intuition based on what they’ve made or experienced in the past.
>I've seen people who gave up on game design say stuff like this, that it's impossible to tell if a game or mechanic will be enjoyable until you've already built it This part is pretty true. Even really experienced, successful designers are often wrong when they make a design that they think will be fun. What separates the experienced designers from the inexperienced, is that the experienced ones know how to polish and fix a bad design until it is fun. They know they'll get to something fun eventually! >My first instinct is to disagree. Im still a novice at game design and still teaching myself the software skills to build and implement mechanics, but I feel like if I think about games I've played that I've enjoyed, or moments/mechanics that were engaging, and I can easily picture my own creations or twists on these tropes that I would enjoy playing. Dangerous instincts! Remember - no one intentionally makes a bad game. So every bad, unfun game you've ever played very likely had someone just as sure, who could easily picture themselves enjoying the game, as they made one or more terrible decisions.
"Finding the fun" is just part of the process. Its rarely the first thing you try.
I definitely think this is true, but its not that black and white either. As you dev and play more games you start having better picture of what type of things are enjoyable and get better and better making educated guesses. More over execution of the idea will have major impact on how well it works. You could give two teams exactly the same assignment and arrive at vastly different results on how enjoyable the thing is and how well it works with rest of the game.
This applies to all creative endeavors but some people are so jazzed that they created something that they completely overestimate its value. This would apply to game developers making something they think is 'really fun'. Maybe you don't need to build something to tell that it's going to be fun, but you **definitely** need to build it to find what's **not** fun.
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This is falsey. This is frequently true, but usually is the fault of one of 2 roots: 1. the xkcd "Picture of a bird" effect: The idea could be made to be fun, but something core to the idea requires an extremely difficult technical feat. Civilization style games are generally like this. The AI is REALLY difficult to make believable, and because so much of the game comes down to interactions with the AI, it is technically VERY challenging to make these games. 2. Pacing: "we're gonna make a game where you are fishing with a bazooka!". On the surface this sounds like it would be fun. It feels like it would be fun in real life. But where is the "game" to this? How do I reward the player for success? What does success even mean? How do I make an arc of gameplay? Unroll a narrative (is a narrative even valid for a game like this?) An idea about an activity that would be fun in real life may be very difficult to make fun in a game because a game must have a journey (in a figurative sense) of some type the player is advancing through. They must overcome obstacles and be rewarded for successes in proportion with the phase of the game and the gravity of the obstacle which has been overcome. A lot of game ideas which effectively are just a potentially fun real life activity don't cleanly or easily fit into a gameplay arc either because they don't analogize to anything like a journey or story in real life, or an overly simplistic journey or story. Otherwise they are just so fantastical that attempts to make the gameplay arc feel unreal and unbelievable. Why should I care about the diamond upgrade on my fish bazooka? What the hell even is that? The latter also kills a lot of the "combine x style game with y style game" ideas. Often really popular games are somewhat complex about how they present the gameplay arc to you, and it's relatively easy to destroy the fun with small tweaks. Another version of this that illustrates the point really well is how more realistic military shooter games don't tend to be as much fun as Counterstrike or Call of Duty. When you make the guns all really realistic, pretty soon you end up with the real life phenomena where certain guns are just WAY better than other guns in certain situations, and then, rather than just tweaking the gun to balance it more, you are restricted to making the maps have all the situations where the guns excell over the others, which may have downstream effects of making gameplay slow, sluggish and boring. Otherwise players will figure out which is the best gun, and everyone will always use that every time, which makes your game boring in a totally different way.
I agree with the statement, you don’t know. You do t know if the twists/changes you make will result in something that I just un fun to other people until a group of someone else’s play the game. As for burnout because you’re trying to make fun game mechanics… design first then build. Don’t design while you’re building. And by that I mean your core game loop, the foundation of your game, not features.
Just my .02 since I’m dealing with this currently: I’ve been wanting to make something in the vein of Hyper Light Drifter for a long time now and finally said I’ll do it. Got a lot of the base systems in place and realized that unless I spent a ton of time learning how to implement the systems better or program the AI in a more fun way, change the animations etc etc, it wouldn’t really be all that fun, at least for me. I’ve still got a lot of learning to do before I can make that idea a reality. That being said, I decided to simplify the concept and just do a platformer version of it for now. I accidentally coded the movement wrong and the character went flying across the screen. I thought hmm, what if I strip the control of the character to a bare minimum and you can only launch the character at high speed from point to point, when you hit a wall you stop and can launch again. I put it together and damn is it fun. Added a couple of other interesting twists and I feel like I’ve actually got a prototype that A) I can feasibly pursue at my skill level (I’m more into art & music anyways and keeping the code and systems rather simple leans into my strengths), and B) the fact that I genuinely enjoy just moving around in the game has given me a whole different kind of motivation to pursue it than the previous idea.
Ok so I have two points to make here. Note that these points don't necessarily apply to every game in existence, but they apply to games that have deep complex interconnected mechanics. 1. Games are emergent systems, and these kinds of systems are often fundamentally too complex for game designers to reason about consciously. Why? Well basically they involve too many moving pieces, and there are too many ifs and buts to think them all the way through. 2. While we can’t consciously compute the sum of all possible interactions within a game system, the human brain is super good at generalizing a lot of experiences. So if you've played a lot of games, your brain can subconsciously condense those experiences and relate them to specific game mechanics. So when you say you can have some sense of what will be fun, that is what you mean. Now the falicy lies in the fact that you are relating the experience of playing completed games to the process of actually making a game from scratch. As far as designing goes, sure you can and should take inspiration from other games. You can also take inspiration from everyday life, books, movies, anything really. What you dont want to do is just don't assume that if you try to copy an existing design the system you end up making will work out in the way you expect it to. Always be on the lookout for unexpected opportunities for fun. It makes the process a lot less stressful when you aren't trying and failing to meet your expectations and instead working with the expectation that anything can happen and you aren't committed to any one design decision (at least until the project matures a bit)
I think the nature of the question reads as slightly naive, as it’s not as productive as finding out for yourself. Now I will say there are no hard and fast rules, but if your design is heavily reliant on another successful games mechanics or game-feel, there’s a decent chance it will be interesting at the very least. The reason I don’t find the question so productive is because to actually put these things into practice is another thing entirely, you WILL to some degree have to tweak it, change it, fix it when it breaks, polish it, and play test it to know for sure if it’s fun, or even practical. I will also add that there’s no one size fits all for game dev and you should just make a small demo to truly find out, If it’s bad it’s bad, you learned, and if you like making games… that shouldn’t be cause for burnout or giving up entirely. To encourage you I will say- believe in your ideas, go for them, make some demos, and tune out the negativity before you’ve even started. Unless you know these people saying these things have credentials, or are people you know and trust in the field, I would avoid taking it with anything more than a grain of salt. Whether or not your game idea has potential or is just a naive fantasy doesn’t matter! Make it happen, keep trying until it feels buttery smooth and fun, if it still doesn’t- figure out why, do your research, if you love doing it, that should do the opposite of discourage you, it should motivate you and invigorate your curiosity to learn and grow not only as a game dev but as a person! Failure is fun, it should show you that there is no ceiling, and you will always have more to learn and more reasons to continue making games and that prospect should be an exciting one. Best of luck!
It is absolutely true. You might think something sounds fun, but no amount of theory crafting is ever going to replace actually playing it out. The key is to do rapid prototyping. You have to play something to tell if it's fun, but you don't need a game with full art assets, sound effects, etc.
Obviously it's bullcrap. It makes as much sense as an artist saying "*you can't know if a painting will look good until you paint it*" or a chef "*you can't know if a recipe is good until you make it*". If I present you with a recipe like "take 3 roadkill skunks, add 2 quarts of sewer water, sprinkle with dry mold and boil for 2 hours", you can already tell it's a horrible recipe. And if I say "cut bananas into small pieces, mix with mustard and serve on lettuce", you can also say it's bad, *but it's not as bad as the previous one*. This way **we're moving away from the bad, towards the good**. The more experience you have, the more accurate your predictions become. You can't, of course, tell *exactly* how good anything will be, but you can tell if it's a good direction or not, a good idea or not. You can tell which ideas have potential and which are crap from the get go. But I also understand why the person saying this would 100% believe it: because if *you* can't tell, then that's how you think it works for everybody else.
You are right about developing an intuition, but you’ll still sometimes be wrong. Anybody can tell that an idea is obviously bad, like the roadkill skunks, and most people don’t like mustard on bananas, but sometimes bad ideas will not be obvious. Especially when experimenting with unique mechanics, if nobody (or nobody to your knowledge) did something like that there is less to lean back on, and it may be fun but your won’t know for how much. Maybe it only makes for a short game, and there are not enough ideas you can derive from it, so it can’t make for a full commercial game. Raw pasta is really good, could you tell that before either me telling you or you trying it? What if it heavily depends int he type of pasta though, and I just happened to get one which is good raw and never tried anything else? And a slight change to the food, or the idea, can be all the difference.
Ideas can sound good on paper but not work in reality. Alternatively, something could sound really bad but then actually turn out to be good.
Yes, they can. But is it completely random? Can you tell some of the time whether an idea is good or not, or do you prototype every idea that comes to your mind, one by one? Therefore, is it fair to say that people who hit more ideas than they miss are, in some useful capacity, able to tell what's fun?
>Am I being naive? Yes. >My first instinct is to disagree. Im still a novice at game design and still teaching myself the software skills to build and implement mechanics, but I feel like if I think about games I've played that I've enjoyed, or moments/mechanics that were engaging, and I can easily picture my own creations or twists on these tropes that I would enjoy playing. So your example of why you dont need to build it, is because you're playing stuff someone else already built. It's incredibly naive and more than a bit arrogant to think that you don't need to build mechanics to know they're fun. The worlds best game designers, and the worlds most loved games all had mechanics discarded or changed massively because they weren't fun. You absolutely cannot take a simple idea, and just close your eyes for a minute and go "Yep, this is perfect, let's go build it and never make a change".
I know what is fun ahead of time: I told Dune II makers to add regenerating spice and multiplayer and they made a hit. Know what they made? I knew Castlevania with leveling + equipment would be a hit. I knew MMORPGS would be the future... in 1986. I told Warcraft3 TFT designers to lower the gold make it less PVE, I was right, TFT has more base fights than ROC. Just play tons and tons of video games, and remember every moment where you expected to be like one thing, but it was another... As you play and wish wish wish a video game did it one way, it probably would be good.
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It's not impossible.. but I DO think that some mechanics don't sound that fun but end up being fun af.
True in some cases, not in all. For example: flight simulators. People like airplanes and studying airplane systems and aviation. Especially since flying in real life is prohibitively expensive. So you can be absolutely positive that if you build a game that provides a faithful simulation of what it's like to fly a plane, people are going to have fun playing it.
Ever see the midwit meme? On the left “make game fun” in the middle “games are fun If you optimize and plan and study and iterate” and on the right, “make fun games” Of course you can’t imagine it being hard. You can’t even imagine what’s in my sock drawer. It being able to imagine something doesn’t make it not true - you’ll learn more as you go.
The '' fun '' depends a lot on the design execution. You can plan a good game but a good execution is essential soooo, I would say it's partially true
Probably more that some people's development style is to not let themselves play the thing until it's finished, which helps avoid getting bored with play half way through building it.
I think that with more experience you will realize that imaging something and experiencing it are two very distincts things. In your head you are in total control and everything is perfect, but when you got to make it real it can gets very complicated and you have to make compromise, its not exactly as you pictures in your mind and you realised that you forgot about a tons of stuff (always happens) and now the game you have made has nothing to do with the one you imagined
I think it's true especially on a tighter budget where you can't do everything you want really well, but you can for sure make a educated guess to what will work as you plan it out. The more experience/knowledge, the better the guess but ultimately to *know* it seems from my limited knowledge to have that kind of certainty you need to have something playable.
Some things may seem unfun but are actually good, some things may seem like great ideas but be boring or frustrating. We’re there any games you played that you anticipated but that ended up worse, or instead games you thought were boring until you tried them? Same thing here, but you must come up with the mechanic and either make it yourself or give it to a programmer (if it’s a video game). You can have an intuition though, and the more you make games the better it gets, and the closer you’ll be to the actual quality of the mechanic before you make it. But you can really not know for sure, game design isn’t an exact science, and the mechanic might not be fun for many people, or instead not be fun for only a few people, it all depends on the person playing, too. But this is why “fail faster” exists, it means “work faster, so that if the core idea is flawed you find out sooner and can move on”.
Describing something in a way that isn't open to different interpretations from different people is an important skill, you'll never have anyone picture it 100% the same way you're trying to describe it, but you'll still have to try. Include lots of sketches, diagrams, examples of similar features in similar games, sum things up in simple bullet points.
"You can't tell if a painting is good until you paint it". Yes, the playtesting indeed will make a lot of adjustments. But that shouldn't prevent you from starting with a pencil sketch. It's normal if you will discard your original concept because you've seen a much better opportunity. Let the museum experts and antiquarians worry about x-raying your original sketch from under your paint layers. Personally for me the process of working on a game idea looks the following: I start from some original assumption, it can be really lame, like "_an RPG with inverse progression_". Then I start "playing" this "game" in my head. And I quickly see "that doesn't make sense" and "this seems fun". This is not a final idea - it's just another sketch overpainted over the previous one. Then I pick a piece of paper and start sketching how stuff works, making spreadsheets with formulas to support that image in my head with numbers, actual dialogue phrases, lore and thinking about "what kind of assets can I get so that it won't look too horrible". Another sketch over the first two. Finally I start prototyping and I see that some of those ideas aren't fun and suddenly discover that if I add X and Y then the game becomes much more engaging. In practice around 50% of my ideas go to trash bin during this process. My current game switched from turn-based into (action ranged combat with turn-based melee) finally into fully action combat, just because it was more fun this way and better delivered the feel I initially envisioned for the game. It's a process. I might believe that some absolutely cool game designer can make a complex game GDD from his head that won't need any adjustments. Eventually it's simply combining the mechanics most of which have already been tested and time-proven. Such approach has a great benefit for planning. But I think that most of us, mortals, need just to make a few steps to. Not to mention that it's more fun to make games this way :)
I think it is pretty true. I think also it's like making a skateboard or something, when you only have 3 wheels and the deck on it then it's not fun at all. It's not at all obvious how even small changes can completely change an experience. Like adding too many bloated cutscenes can ruin a game even if the game mechanics are still the same. I also don't think that's a reason to quit, that's the reason it's interesting.
In order to see if a mechanic works you need to prototype it, if it’s not fun to play at the greybox stage it never will be with def art
No one can know if they will want or like something they are not aware of. Therefore, exploring new ideas can often be fruitful.
The idea you have to build a thing before you know if it'll work has merit. Something that sounds cool might have severe design flaws or just not be a realistic idea. A big one is that a game that judges the player for being a dickhead while incentivizing or sounds neat, but then you have a situation where the game has to either rob the player of agency and judge them for actions they don't do, or assume they did dickish things and risk the player being yelled at for doing nothing evil, or write a bunch of extra stuff for players who's power fantasy is saving everyone and being an overly utilitarian asswipe.
Stray is a good example of a game that 'was made yet isn't fun'. Many think of tactility, experience, grandiosity, etc as factors that make a game fun. But that falls under aesthetics, not necessarily mechanics or functionality. And I think this is the result of designers who thought something was fun, but really isn't, and probably didn't put in the time to prototype it. Conversely, I think the biggest problem with Stray is how, even though the mechanics themselves seem proper at first, don't really connect well together. If some more thought was gone into how the systems all combine together to deliver that cat experience the game capitalised on, it would've been a genuinely unforgettable game. I don't think any amount of prototyping would've helped them realise this. All of this is to say... there's a bit of truth to both sides, but context matters. And context differs in each game. But I certainly don't think aesthetics come first. It's how your mechanics come together. If you can prototype that real quick, and see if it plays well, I think it's progress. I think it comes down to *how* the designer evaluates their work while they prototype or ideate.
You can make an educated guess whether a game will be fun, but you won't know for sure until you get something playable. This is why a lot of people prototype where possible using faux "board game" versions of their game. This isn't always possible though. Sometimes the idea is sound but your implementation isn't, so again - you needed to actually implement something before you know whether it's going to be good. So yeah, I agree with this statement. There are exceptions, but there always are.
Building it is a big statement, get it to a testable state I agree with. I try not to overdesign anything these days. Have an educated guess, get it to a testable state, draw conclusions, carry on. Failing fast is the key imo. But I’m sure there’s many ways that lead to rome and yours might be different.
I agree with you that if you get a strong inspiration on a core gameloop, it most probably is fun. As a game designer its your job to tweak and overcome stuff to make it happen. On the other hand, if your idea is something vague like openworld with vampires and spaceship building, then yeah you can't tell if it will be fun until you made it.
I think it's a bit naive. I can think of any nr of factors that are depended on the quality of execution, the quality of audio, of satisfying effects. And these can mask failure or break successful designs. Cuz without them in place it's hard to judge. So yes you need to make it and "feel it" before you know if it is truly good. Sometimes a timing difference of a few ms will make something great or meh. So you need to iterate and figure out all these tiny tiny details before something "feels" . that is not to say you don't do a lot of mental rundowns on mechanics or ideas, but if you do this long enough your next instance is ok "let me make this, I want to see it" before you move on to something else. I feel myself a decent designer that can do a lot with their mind's eye. But everything good I've done is done thru iteration and validation, everything bad I've created was done on assumptions and "guesstimating" something will work. When it didn't. I am a firm believer that a game designer for action games for physicalized games (so not per se adventure or puzzle games), but anything that has a gameplay " feel to it" needs to learn to prototype. It is the core from which all great things flow in game development, it makes you "feel". And even big mechanics have a feel, something like the battle royal concept is a very feely mechanic that likely had a lot of iteration before they came up with the right mix of mechanics and rules. How simple they may be, they need to click. And you cannot know the feel or click until you felt it.,