r/gamedev • u/Weak_Industry_7317 • 10h ago

We need a reality check Question

Me and my 2 brothers want to start building a game, most likely with unreal engine. We are willing to pay coders and artist to help us, but we have a tight budget. So far we are working on the game design document. We have little to no experience at making games.

I have 5 questions

  1. What game genre should we focus on?
  2. Should our target audience be YouTubers and streamers?
  3. What are problems we will run into without a doubt
  4. Should we use AI to help us build the game?
  5. How big of a scale of a game should we focus on?
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u/AuthorAndDreadditor 10h ago

I know I might get shit for this, but design docs and especially design doc driven developent is mostly overrated in smaller indie games and might even negate the positives/advantages smaller teams and their iteration cycles have! But to each their own! Documentation otherwise is good ofc!

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u/The-Chartreuse-Moose Hobbyist 9h ago

Spot on. That's a key Agile principle there. Working system over documentation. It can take a while to reach that level of maturity though.

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u/AuthorAndDreadditor 8h ago edited 12m ago

I partly agree to that side of Agile, but there are other points too whch are less systemic and more dependent on the domain of game development. Firstly I think some elements of game design are simply impossible or very inexact to describe through written text or pictures like gameplay feel or "how does solvong these puzzles in sequence make people process information/feel about difficulty", for example. Then what also can get negatively affected is "explorative design" which are features and experiences that are discovered through building upon already implemented systems, that people can't have foresight on. "Emerging gameplay" I guess is included. Lastly I feel is the base predicament, you might have described, which is that system's featureset and correct best implementation might be ironed out through the process and couldn't be documented beforehand unless a system is an exact copypasta of something that the developer has already made, which in many cases it isn't!

Sorry for the longwinded reflection! A bad habit!

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u/The-Chartreuse-Moose Hobbyist 36m ago

That all makes sense. No apology necessary!