game design – Jesse Bollinger

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 #1: How to make changes to gameplay without screwing up existing balance

Most game designers tend to just modify the parameters of the entities (the objects, items, creatures, abilities, etc) of their games arbitrarily, in an undisciplined way. They just freely change each parameter however they want, and believe (falsely) that the only part of the game’s balance that will consequentially change is the specific thing they modified.

However, this is actually not a safe way of making changes if you care about preserving a game’s carefully calibrated pre-existing balance. Many changes have unexpected effects. It is a common experience among game designers that after making a bunch of seemingly simple changes the balance of the game seems to have shifted in a frustratingly unpredictable way. Luckily though, there is an easy way to often greatly reduce this effect.