game project management – Jesse Bollinger

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 #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 #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.