Development Starting my game design journey, any tips?

ww_y

Member
Hey all! Just started getting into game design in the past couple of years and I fell in love with it as a narrative medium. I started with RPG maker, which was a fun way to get introduced to programming but a very limited tool for the type of games I was passionate about. Coming from being an English Major, but also being the type of person that likes to teach themselves a new skill, Game Maker programming has been a unique mix of both those passions. I'm coming from a background of zero programming experience too so I realize I have a long road ahead of me, but I am excited to create interactive fun stories that make people feel something while they're playing.

If there is anybody who has recently just started programming or has been for a very long time, I'd like to hear what's been the greatest challenge for you as well as what is the reason you keep trying to overcome those challenges. And if there is anybody with just random tips for a newbie, I'd love to hear them!

Also, this is more of a forum question, I'm thinking to kind of documenting my progress of slowly teaching myself how to program and game design through posts like these, would this be the appropriate thread to do it in?
 

Yal

šŸ§ *penguin noises*
GMC Elder
Programming has a very interesting difficulty curve, it's basically impossible for a long time, but once you have an intuitive understanding for concepts like loops and variables, everything will just fall into place because you can start connecting the dots.

I've been doing this for like 15 years so I don't remember what I struggled with early on, but here's some random pointers:
  • Make many small projects to learn how to make games, do not start on your dream project right away. Keeping a large project organized takes in-depth understanding of how programming works, and if you don't have that you'll end up with a buggy mess that breaks down whenever you do anything, or just is painful to work in in general. (My first big project sure had issues with that - it's got about one twelfth of what I intended to include in the game when it was finished)
  • Don't overload the player with exposition in the first few minutes. This is always tempting, and I imagine it's even more so when you have actual writing skills, but players will get bored and just try to get to "the game part" after a few minutes of dialogue.
    A really good game intro is NieR's first few seconds. (Timestamped, jump to 2m 35s if it doesn't work)
    1. Establishing shot of a broken bridge in a snowy modern city.
    2. Another establishing shot, revealing that the bridge was torn down to build some sort of concrete barrier you usually see in modern warzones.
    3. Third establishing shot, revealing snowfall against a large expanse of destroyed buildings.
    4. "2053."
    5. "Summer 2053."
      These first few seconds tells us that the world is messed up and how, but not why. This establishes a mystery and you really want to know what happened. Then the section after that sets up the two main characters, and then immediately drops some weak monsters and a boss on you, letting you actually play the game. After this section, the game transitions to the real story, with one of the most confusing transitions ever.
  • Don't be afraid to use stock assets, you don't need to do everything. But make sure to keep notes on licenses, and only include assets you know you're allowed to use (e.g. if you're planning to sell the game one day, don't include noncommercial assets, and if you use Share Alike assets, remember that you're obliged to make your edits available for download!). I personally only ever use CC0 stuff whenever possible, just to have an easier time with crediting, but usually you need to swallow your pride to access the really good stuff.
  • But even if you use stock assets, it really helps to get basic understanding in digital art and audio design. If you don't personalize your assets, it usually gets pretty visible that your game is just a hodgepodge of random stuff you found on the internet; things like palette swaps so everything has a consistent color scheme really helps bringing disparate tilesets together (e.g. if you mix Happy Chocolate Land tiles with Graveskull's Gruesome Mortuary, you probably want to mute the colors of the former, or make the latter's more vibrant) and stock sound effects might fit better in if you mix a bunch of sounds together to create something unique (e.g. mix together 3 separate "creaking planks" samples with a short snippet of a "rattle a drawer full of objects" sample to get an unique "opening a spooky door" sound). Once you have these skills, it gets much easier to communicate with artists and audio designer if you ever need to work in a team, or commission custom assets.
  • Game jams are a good way to practice many skills at once: asset creation, coding, performing under pressure, working with creative constraints (i.e., following a jam theme). Itchio's community jams page is a good place to start, there's constantly a flow of new events all the time so you can just join something that suits your schedule: https://itch.io/jams
  • Whether you're extrovert or introvert, it's good for motivation to find a bunch of people that also do game development / programming to chat with occasionally. The GMC is one of those places, but there's also plenty of Discord servers dedicated to game development in one way or another.


Also some videos to get you started:
"I'm an english major and I want to make games" sounds a lot like the background of the guy that made YIIK: A Postmodern RPG (he was a liberal arts major, but details - it's one of those boring subjects that aren't programming :p) so I think it could be good if you watch TehSnakerer's breakdown of how and why the project failed. It's a massive video, but it goes into adrianean depth and gives the project a surprisingly fair analysis. It's well worth the time. Snakey's stuff in general is pretty good, him covering weird outlier games that tries new stuff (and usually fails) is really inspirational.

For something less gargantuan and more immediately practical, Mark "Game Maker's Toolkit" Brown is your guy. Stellar editing, short and to the point breakdown of game design concepts.

I've got some art and music channels as well, but maybe we should wait with that 'til you've gotten more comfortable with programming...? :p
 
Motivation is, to my opinion, the greatest enemy of solo game developers. The common mistakes game creators do is get overwhelmed in a game idea and end up never finishing their game.

Keep yourself motivated and be prepared for A LOT of work. Most solo game devs that want to create commercial games will realise that a game is not born in a few weeks. It takes years. Here is a small list I do think is very important to consider in your development:
  1. Game style (keep your game style the same, do not get lost in many different styles just because you find it cool)
  2. User interface "GUI" (games require good user interface, choose wisely. You may want it controlled by keyboard and mouse, a controller or on a hand held device, user interface will not be the same for all these different devices and players love to have some neat and easy interface)
  3. Complicated game mechanics (Along with a good GUI, players play games because they want to calm themselves down. Some games require good thinking as it's part of the game, but if a super complicated mechanics is added to this, even with a good game, players will need a lot of concentration before playing, hence, reducing their playtime with your creation)
  4. Story (We all love stories, along with GUI and mechanics, reading is good, but too much reading removes playtime for the player. Invest your time in presenting your game as a playable story rather that reading it because showing texts is easy, but creating a playable story, it's more challenging but worth all the effort)
  5. Gameplay (We cannot go over game making without a good gameplay. As I said before, players want to play. Tutorials in your game are good practices instead of using lines to read. Simple and easy pickups at the beginning and using them in obvious ways will encourage the player to move on and feel that they are learning without forcing much. Long tutorials are also never a good idea. Better show the basics and let the player understand that what they learned can be expanded to learn more on their own later.)
  6. Controls (I've seen many people bust their luck on controls because they are used to play a certain way and assume people will play like them...WRONG. Give you player control over his/her controls, a nice GUI to customize their controls is good. But, like GTZ V where there is literally pages of controls to define is not better either. I bought myself a controller just to not go through those horrible controls setup. You don't need too many control to make a game fun and easy to play with still many things to do. Combine simple controls with a good GUI and you will get something good.)
  7. Aimed audience (Not all ages will play your game, not all players will play your game, not all genders will play your game. Be sure to focus on a specific type of audience and do not be too greedy. Having multiple game styles to reach out many audiences is never a good idea. Mario is a platformer and is very popular and they did not change the core game (leaving their side projects alone such as Mario Kart and Sports), initially, it was and still is a platformer and they stick to it and it still is very popular. So aim for a specific audience and create your world arround that)
  8. Customer support (When your game will be ready for demo or alpha or may it be a kickstarter, remember that you will need to handle all of that support. From a discord channel to Steam comments and bugs, be ready to invest time on this and when I say time, it's possible at least 50% of your time if not more. Players with bad customer service just will abandon you. They may accept a few flaws at the beginning but if you do not take care of your fellow customer players, this game may be the last one you will make)
  9. Player feedback (In relation to customer support, player feedback is essential for the success of your game. Never be ashamed of critics or bad reviews. Reviews are there to perfection yourself and find the flaws of your game, things you may not have even though of. Good reviews are not just there to flatter you but also give you points that are strong in your game you should maintain or do even better, it can even make you think of other elements to add to your game to amplify something already good)
  10. YOU ARE THE AUTHOR (Never forget that. Yes, player feedback is important, and yes, customer support is important, but never forget that they are not the ones that program, you spent your time, invested money, you are capable of knowing what suits your game or not. Do not get overwhelmed by player requests because there will be lots of them. Stay true to your roots and believe in your game while smartly filtering the good "bad" reviews and leaving those that just complain because they made a mistake buying a game they don't like. In the end, the player is responsible of informing themselves properly about a game before buying and don't complain to the autthor to design their game to their own liking. You do not work for them.)
  11. Ads and budget (You WILL spend money and what you do not know or cannot learn, if you want it, you will eventually need to pay for it. If you cannot draw, you will pay someone to draw or buy sprites. You cannot create music or sounds, original and good quality music and sounds come at a price. And if you do not want to pay, it WILL take you lots of time to learn those parts. A game is much more than programming and placing objects in a room. There's art, sounds, music, presentation and of course, ads to attract players. Be prepared to spend a lot of time building gameplay videos, streaming and trailers. These short videos of 30 seconds to 2 minutes take a lot of time to create, capturing the right images, the right sequences and integrating texts and voice over attractive music, it will require time and patience)
I hope this help you to understand and prepare yourself. I would suggest you give yourself time and patience. Do not hurry yourself. I've been thinking of a game years ago, I create DaRic - Lost Explorer 2 available on itch.io and today, I am just finalising the story of a sequel. I'm studying my own game, figuring out the do's and dont's. I've built a story, composed an original music without any experience whatsoever and I am learning to draw HD graphics. BUT, on top of it all, I also am trying to motivate myself to begin working on this full time but all ideas I have, I write down so I will not forget them.

Patience and perseverance will create your success.
 

ww_y

Member
Programming has a very interesting difficulty curve, it's basically impossible for a long time, but once you have an intuitive understanding for concepts like loops and variables, everything will just fall into place because you can start connecting the dots.

I've been doing this for like 15 years so I don't remember what I struggled with early on, but here's some random pointers:
  • Make many small projects to learn how to make games, do not start on your dream project right away. Keeping a large project organized takes in-depth understanding of how programming works, and if you don't have that you'll end up with a buggy mess that breaks down whenever you do anything, or just is painful to work in in general. (My first big project sure had issues with that - it's got about one twelfth of what I intended to include in the game when it was finished)
  • Don't overload the player with exposition in the first few minutes. This is always tempting, and I imagine it's even more so when you have actual writing skills, but players will get bored and just try to get to "the game part" after a few minutes of dialogue.
    A really good game intro is NieR's first few seconds. (Timestamped, jump to 2m 35s if it doesn't work)
    1. Establishing shot of a broken bridge in a snowy modern city.
    2. Another establishing shot, revealing that the bridge was torn down to build some sort of concrete barrier you usually see in modern warzones.
    3. Third establishing shot, revealing snowfall against a large expanse of destroyed buildings.
    4. "2053."
    5. "Summer 2053."
      These first few seconds tells us that the world is messed up and how, but not why. This establishes a mystery and you really want to know what happened. Then the section after that sets up the two main characters, and then immediately drops some weak monsters and a boss on you, letting you actually play the game. After this section, the game transitions to the real story, with one of the most confusing transitions ever.
  • Don't be afraid to use stock assets, you don't need to do everything. But make sure to keep notes on licenses, and only include assets you know you're allowed to use (e.g. if you're planning to sell the game one day, don't include noncommercial assets, and if you use Share Alike assets, remember that you're obliged to make your edits available for download!). I personally only ever use CC0 stuff whenever possible, just to have an easier time with crediting, but usually you need to swallow your pride to access the really good stuff.
  • But even if you use stock assets, it really helps to get basic understanding in digital art and audio design. If you don't personalize your assets, it usually gets pretty visible that your game is just a hodgepodge of random stuff you found on the internet; things like palette swaps so everything has a consistent color scheme really helps bringing disparate tilesets together (e.g. if you mix Happy Chocolate Land tiles with Graveskull's Gruesome Mortuary, you probably want to mute the colors of the former, or make the latter's more vibrant) and stock sound effects might fit better in if you mix a bunch of sounds together to create something unique (e.g. mix together 3 separate "creaking planks" samples with a short snippet of a "rattle a drawer full of objects" sample to get an unique "opening a spooky door" sound). Once you have these skills, it gets much easier to communicate with artists and audio designer if you ever need to work in a team, or commission custom assets.
  • Game jams are a good way to practice many skills at once: asset creation, coding, performing under pressure, working with creative constraints (i.e., following a jam theme). Itchio's community jams page is a good place to start, there's constantly a flow of new events all the time so you can just join something that suits your schedule: https://itch.io/jams
  • Whether you're extrovert or introvert, it's good for motivation to find a bunch of people that also do game development / programming to chat with occasionally. The GMC is one of those places, but there's also plenty of Discord servers dedicated to game development in one way or another.


Also some videos to get you started:
"I'm an english major and I want to make games" sounds a lot like the background of the guy that made YIIK: A Postmodern RPG (he was a liberal arts major, but details - it's one of those boring subjects that aren't programming :p) so I think it could be good if you watch TehSnakerer's breakdown of how and why the project failed. It's a massive video, but it goes into adrianean depth and gives the project a surprisingly fair analysis. It's well worth the time. Snakey's stuff in general is pretty good, him covering weird outlier games that tries new stuff (and usually fails) is really inspirational.

For something less gargantuan and more immediately practical, Mark "Game Maker's Toolkit" Brown is your guy. Stellar editing, short and to the point breakdown of game design concepts.

I've got some art and music channels as well, but maybe we should wait with that 'til you've gotten more comfortable with programming...? :p
Woah thanks for all the info, that is super helpful! Especially for the new youtube channel to watch. I am well acquainted with Mark Brown (I'm pretty sure I've watched every video he's made about five times each), but the more game design channels I can add to my list the better!

I have started my journey working through Shaun Spalding's tutorials on youtube and using the code I learn there to tinker and try making small little projects with the little code I have, as well as learning bit by bit how to implement something I'm interested in coding when needed. So I feel like I'm on the right foot, but it is hard to limit yourself on just small projects and resist the urge to try going for "the big one".

thanks again for all your tips! I will be rereading your post a lot to make sure I absorb all that sweet wisdom you've accrued in your 15 years of game design!

Also, feel free to drop those art and music channels, I probably won't make sure of them until I've gotten the hang of the more basic game design elements, but having them bookmarked wouldn't hurt!
 

ww_y

Member
Motivation is, to my opinion, the greatest enemy of solo game developers. The common mistakes game creators do is get overwhelmed in a game idea and end up never finishing their game.

Keep yourself motivated and be prepared for A LOT of work. Most solo game devs that want to create commercial games will realise that a game is not born in a few weeks. It takes years. Here is a small list I do think is very important to consider in your development:
  1. Game style (keep your game style the same, do not get lost in many different styles just because you find it cool)
  2. User interface "GUI" (games require good user interface, choose wisely. You may want it controlled by keyboard and mouse, a controller or on a hand held device, user interface will not be the same for all these different devices and players love to have some neat and easy interface)
  3. Complicated game mechanics (Along with a good GUI, players play games because they want to calm themselves down. Some games require good thinking as it's part of the game, but if a super complicated mechanics is added to this, even with a good game, players will need a lot of concentration before playing, hence, reducing their playtime with your creation)
  4. Story (We all love stories, along with GUI and mechanics, reading is good, but too much reading removes playtime for the player. Invest your time in presenting your game as a playable story rather that reading it because showing texts is easy, but creating a playable story, it's more challenging but worth all the effort)
  5. Gameplay (We cannot go over game making without a good gameplay. As I said before, players want to play. Tutorials in your game are good practices instead of using lines to read. Simple and easy pickups at the beginning and using them in obvious ways will encourage the player to move on and feel that they are learning without forcing much. Long tutorials are also never a good idea. Better show the basics and let the player understand that what they learned can be expanded to learn more on their own later.)
  6. Controls (I've seen many people bust their luck on controls because they are used to play a certain way and assume people will play like them...WRONG. Give you player control over his/her controls, a nice GUI to customize their controls is good. But, like GTZ V where there is literally pages of controls to define is not better either. I bought myself a controller just to not go through those horrible controls setup. You don't need too many control to make a game fun and easy to play with still many things to do. Combine simple controls with a good GUI and you will get something good.)
  7. Aimed audience (Not all ages will play your game, not all players will play your game, not all genders will play your game. Be sure to focus on a specific type of audience and do not be too greedy. Having multiple game styles to reach out many audiences is never a good idea. Mario is a platformer and is very popular and they did not change the core game (leaving their side projects alone such as Mario Kart and Sports), initially, it was and still is a platformer and they stick to it and it still is very popular. So aim for a specific audience and create your world arround that)
  8. Customer support (When your game will be ready for demo or alpha or may it be a kickstarter, remember that you will need to handle all of that support. From a discord channel to Steam comments and bugs, be ready to invest time on this and when I say time, it's possible at least 50% of your time if not more. Players with bad customer service just will abandon you. They may accept a few flaws at the beginning but if you do not take care of your fellow customer players, this game may be the last one you will make)
  9. Player feedback (In relation to customer support, player feedback is essential for the success of your game. Never be ashamed of critics or bad reviews. Reviews are there to perfection yourself and find the flaws of your game, things you may not have even though of. Good reviews are not just there to flatter you but also give you points that are strong in your game you should maintain or do even better, it can even make you think of other elements to add to your game to amplify something already good)
  10. YOU ARE THE AUTHOR (Never forget that. Yes, player feedback is important, and yes, customer support is important, but never forget that they are not the ones that program, you spent your time, invested money, you are capable of knowing what suits your game or not. Do not get overwhelmed by player requests because there will be lots of them. Stay true to your roots and believe in your game while smartly filtering the good "bad" reviews and leaving those that just complain because they made a mistake buying a game they don't like. In the end, the player is responsible of informing themselves properly about a game before buying and don't complain to the autthor to design their game to their own liking. You do not work for them.)
  11. Ads and budget (You WILL spend money and what you do not know or cannot learn, if you want it, you will eventually need to pay for it. If you cannot draw, you will pay someone to draw or buy sprites. You cannot create music or sounds, original and good quality music and sounds come at a price. And if you do not want to pay, it WILL take you lots of time to learn those parts. A game is much more than programming and placing objects in a room. There's art, sounds, music, presentation and of course, ads to attract players. Be prepared to spend a lot of time building gameplay videos, streaming and trailers. These short videos of 30 seconds to 2 minutes take a lot of time to create, capturing the right images, the right sequences and integrating texts and voice over attractive music, it will require time and patience)
I hope this help you to understand and prepare yourself. I would suggest you give yourself time and patience. Do not hurry yourself. I've been thinking of a game years ago, I create DaRic - Lost Explorer 2 available on itch.io and today, I am just finalising the story of a sequel. I'm studying my own game, figuring out the do's and dont's. I've built a story, composed an original music without any experience whatsoever and I am learning to draw HD graphics. BUT, on top of it all, I also am trying to motivate myself to begin working on this full time but all ideas I have, I write down so I will not forget them.

Patience and perseverance will create your success.
Super helpful! I feel that the "many hats" aspect of game design is one of the things I enjoy (I'm sure I won't feel like I enjoy it when I'm learning how to do every little thing.) I expect it will be a long, difficult journey, but I am excited to get started on my ideas. Thanks again for your tips!
 
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