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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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