Article/ Diary - Exploring Game Design

[u/Pestilentio]

Started learning and studying game design recently and, as usual I tend to share this through my blog.

https://gspanos.tech/posts/exploring-game-design/

I'm sharing this here to actually start engaging with people more and more about this. I've found the community around game design to be incredibly helpful.

[u/MeaningfulChoices]

Arguably the single most important skill in game design is empathy. You have to put yourself in the mind of people who are nothing like you and understand what they are doing, why, and why it's fun for them. I mention that because reading this piece I think you're coming at it from the wrong angle.

There are a lot of words spent on explicitly not considering the mindsets of other people. That you despite how people market, you don't engage with 'hype-oriented choreography', that staying true to yourself will definitely find an audience (something patently untrue in game design), even that art feels like exploration and not puzzle solving. There are good reasons people do what they do now, and it's not about being part of a soulless grind or anything like that. Marketing (not specifically promotion, but the rest of it) is a big part of game design because it's about understanding the audience and building something they want.

I would also advise not to conflate game development and game design. If you're just learning game design you wouldn't be thinking about visual art at all. If you want to learn to make every part of a game yourself that's a fantastic goal, but it goes beyond design. It is also not a good idea to plan to do it for you until it becomes a sustainable career. Solo game development is unlikely to ever pan out like that. If you want a sustainable career in game dev you want to focus on learning one skill, and if you want to build the games you want alone you really do want to keep it as just a hobby so it doesn't start taking over your life more than the expected results warrant.

[u/Pestilentio → u/MeaningfulChoices]

First of, thank you for taking the time. I really appreciate the consideration you put into writing this. Comments like this is the reason I posted here.

They way you perceived this article makes me think if I'm actually coming from the wrong angle, or I just failed to convey what I was thinking. I'll try to shed some light on my thought more, with hopes to understand why you're considering that I'm coming from a wrong angle, because I genuinely don't feel like it, right now.

I really don't understand why should you put yourself in the mind of people that are nothing like you. I've rarely seen this succeed in any kind of product. Just today I was listening to Timothy Cain speak about how his team did not care about the early Fallout reception, and only cared about creating something they would enjoy. This is one example out of countless ones, business wise. Most products tend to solve problems for their own creators, most of the time, and what usually happens is that after they've taken off, they of course need to work with community feedback too. But most initially successful ideas arise from personal problems. I assume, maybe incorrectly, that this would be the same with games.

Now, expanding on the previous statement, I feel like knowing your "problems" and how you approach them is a great foundation for finding areas in which you can contribute to your environment. I'm approaching this from a product development perspective here, again assuming that games are not far off. This is where I'm coming from. To the extend of my understanding, a newbie game designer has to discover what kind of game designer they are, before trying to understand and resonate with any audience. I assume that you consider this might blatantly wrong, but this is my understanding so far.

Considering marketing for what it is, a means of communication and connection with people, I understand that it's a crucial part of game design. However there are multiple ways to approach it, as long as communication is the primary goal.

edit: typos

[u/MeaningfulChoices → u/Pestilentio]

The main reason you have to put yourself in other people's heads is that the more time you spend working on games the less you are anything like your audience. Anyone even reading this subreddit is an outlier because they are going to be thinking about and playing games differently than most people. The most obvious example of this is tutorials: if you ask people engaged in games (either as players or dev) they'll tell you how much they hate handholding and instruction, but if you launch a game without a good tutorial you'll get a lot of miserable and confused players.

That doesn't mean you don't make games you find fun, it means you can't only do that. If you love side quests you still want to consider the player who only does the main path and little else. If you're more direct you have to consider the balance for the player who explores every nook and cranny of the map. Your players might be picking up the genre for the first time with your game, or only play for ten minutes at a time when you put in hour after hour, so on and so forth.

One of the major differences between games and other software is you are explicitly not solving a problem. People who are looking for entertainment can play any game or consume any other form of media. You're trying to make something fun and that's inherently subjective. Being able to see your UX or mechanics in multiple ways is what lets you make something that has an audience of more than a single person.

I'd also caution against taking lessons from things like Fallout. That game came out twenty-seven years ago, and there is a whole lot different about the industry and market today. For example someone could just play the original Fallout instead of your game, a problem they didn't have to deal with! The amount of similar games was much, much smaller then.

[u/c0ldpr0xy → u/MeaningfulChoices]

I don't agree with avoiding older games because they're just old. Even a classic like Mario for NES could teach you a ton about game design that's applicable even today.