Game Development – Jesse Bollinger

Lack of proper attention to aspect ratio in game settings

It is somewhat surprising how often many game developers seem to not pay sufficient attention to the proper presentation of screen resolution choices with respect to aspect ratio in the settings screens (a.k.a. configuration pages) of games.

Many games (especially PC based games) will present the user with a list of resolutions to choose from somewhere within a graphics settings screen. The list will typically enumerate a number of different resolutions such as 640×480, 800×600, 1280×720, and so on. That’s all well and good of course, but something important is frequently missing from the displayed info: aspect ratio.

Game Dev Tip #10: A game without sound will often feel hollow, even if it is otherwise good

In theory, you might think that it should be easy to appreciate the merits of a game before any sound or music has been added to it, but in practice you might be surprised at how difficult this often is. A game which feels utterly fantastic with all its sound and music in place can easily feel very stale when you silence all of the audio.

The soundscape of a game often drastically impacts the emotions of the person playing it. It can make or break the game. It can even distort the ability of the game designer to accurately perceive what is working and what is not in the game. Don’t make the mistake of underappreciating the importance of having strong audio.

Game Dev Tip #9: Learn how to be creative at will instead of just waiting for inspiration

Aspiring creators often express frustration with not having enough inspiration to feel ready to sit down and do some creative work. These people often say to themselves that they will finish their projects “eventually”, once sufficient inspiration strikes them. They repeatedly postpone their work, using lack of inspiration to justify doing so. This often reduces their creative output to almost nothing.

However, in reality, this kind of problem can be easily avoided. The entire idea of thinking you need to wait for inspiration to strike is usually misguided. It is most often simply used as a nice feel-good excuse to subconsciously justify procrastination. It’s a way to avoid really facing your challenges, while still feeling high on your own imaginary creative genius that you will “eventually” fulfill.

Game Dev Tip #8: The more you try to rush the slower you will usually accomplish your goal

Game development is a very time and labor intensive task. There are so many different moving parts and details that need to be refined and polished. Inevitably this can end up taking quite a long time to do right. It is therefore understandable that many people would feel the urge to rush through their work, given how much they still need to do to complete a project.

However, rushing through game dev work very often will backfire. Rather than speeding things up, doing so will actually often just slow things down. Sure, in the short term rushing may seem to work fine, but in the medium and long term you will usually pay dearly for it. Sloppy work in game dev tends to create lots of compounding problems that will take a long time to fix, if indeed you ever manage to fix them at all.

Game Dev Tip #7: Most game designers should learn at least some computer programming

There is nobody more widely disdained among professional game developers than an unskilled “idea guy/girl”, i.e. than someone who thinks they should be allowed to just come up with all the creative ideas and have everyone else on the team implement those ideas without doing any of the work themselves. Ideas aren’t enough.

One of the fastest ways to get a game developer to ignore you is to tell them that you have some “great game ideas” but don’t have any actual game creation skills yourself and that you want their help. Everybody in game dev has their own game ideas. Very few game devs ever want to work under someone who hasn’t proven their ability to create things with their own hands. You have to prove your creative ability if you want game devs to respect you.

Game Dev Tip #6: A much faster way of finding the best values to use for parameters

Tweaking the parameters for all the entities in a game until they feel just right is very important if you want the final product to feel polished, professional, and fun. Games that haven’t had their parameters carefully chosen tend to feel sloppy and amateurish. However, given that many games often have a vast multitude of different parameters that can be changed, this process can be very time consuming, especially if done in an undisciplined way.

Unfortunately though, many game designers often perform these parameter tweaks in a very arbitrary and naive way. They make changes far too inefficiently and unimaginatively. As a result, the quality of their parameter choices often suffers greatly as a result.

Game Dev Tip #5: Make your game fun as soon as possible, or else it may never be

One of the greatest dangers that a game developer can ever face is to fall so in love with the aesthetics of their theme that they lose sight of ever actually making the game fun. World building may indeed be a wonderful creative exercise, but it is not a game.

Fixating too much on theme will often cause game developers to spend huge amounts of time and resources creating assets that may never even contribute in any meaningful way to the substance of the game. Many game projects have been ruined by this. It often causes game devs to fly blind for very long periods of time without ever testing whether their assumptions about how the game will end up feeling are really true and without considering the schedule.

Game Dev Tip #4: Breathe life into your game with custom shaders and special effects

The standard approach to texturing most objects in most games tends to be to just assign each object to use some combination of diffuse coloring, specularity, normal mapping, transparency, and emission. More advanced physically-based shading techniques are also sometimes used, depending on the needs of each project.

This is all well and good of course, and works fine for many use cases, but sometimes it can get a bit stale. There are a lot more fun and imaginative things that you can do with shaders than just these standard use cases. A shader will let you express any arbitrary visual effect you want. You just need to know how to communicate your intent properly. If you can dream it, you can shade it, pretty much.

Game Dev Tip #3: Make your game immortal using the power of PCG and random generation

Game designers like to think of their worlds as being like living virtual worlds that people can escape to. This is an appealing sentiment, but unfortunately most games don’t really qualify as living virtual worlds. One of the most important reasons why they don’t is because most games can only be experienced once, after which re-experiencing the game immediately becomes mostly an exercise in redundancy. A real living world wouldn’t be like that.

However, it doesn’t have to be this way. A game can be made to be infinitely long and to create a new experience every time it is played. How long the game remains fun after that depends upon the strength of the core gameplay mechanics, but nonetheless the length and surface-level variation of the game can be extended to infinity relatively easily.

Game Dev Tip #2: Good art means so much more than just graphical fidelity

The pursuit of graphical fidelity, render quality, and advanced graphics engine features is often very appealing and difficult to resist, but it can also be a siren’s call. It is often a complete waste of valuable time and resources past a certain point. What the best level of graphical fidelity is depends on each specific game of course, but many game developers fall into the trap of thinking they need far more graphical fidelity than they actually do.

Obsession with raw technical graphical fidelity also has a tendency to distract many game artists from what actually matters the most: the quality and stylistic personality of the art itself. A game with a great art style but a relatively weak graphics engine will almost always be better than a game with a great graphics engine but a terrible art style. Art style and thematic personality are almost always more important than raw graphics tech is.