I am doing a podcast with my friends about games (check out The Adventure Mechanics here) and I decided that I need to try for accountability on actually releasing a game. To that end, I'm going to go through the development process to release a game. Here is the transcript from the twenty-second episode on tooling for your game and keeping your game in mind:
Welcome to another Side Quest for The Adventure Mechanics. I'm Chandler. If you don't know, I run a game design group that talks about game design theory and showcases progress on the games each person is making. It's that one form of accountability that I find most helpful, even though sometimes I don't live up to my ambitions. As new people join the group, I find that they tend to ask very similar questions, especially if they are trying to break into game development as a career. As such, I've been thinking about how I can help them figure out how they can get into the industry and potentially land a job at a studio. Today, I'm going to build off of my last installment of getting started in game development and explore considerations on how to grow both your skill set and your hire-ability after you've taken your first steps into the game design world.
So, in the last installment, I spoke as if you just started your journey. It covered surveying your existing skill set and looking at types of games that would be best to work on to get you started. That includes breaking down your first game into the smallest pieces possible to ensure that you actually finish the game. Using that as our starting point, let's take a look at the next step: building upon that first game and taking your second (and third) step. What could the next step be? Iteration. Getting your first game out is a huge first step, and not an easy step to achieve. And although that first step is rough, it's not enough. You need to go back and build another game. I know, you just climbed the mountain once, why do it again? Well, if you want to work on games, that's your life now. You might as well get into the groove of things and practice, practice, practice. And that means the whole thing: Prototyping and pre-production all the way through to release and support need to be practiced. You don't want to be the buff person at the gym with chicken legs, do you? All those muscles need to be exercised.
Let's say you don't want to go back to the blank page of a new project, though. What else can you do? There's a few options, but my personal go-to for iteration practice is a game jam. I've spoken on them before, but they really are going to be the fastest way to get through an iteration and expand your skill set. Many even provide either theme or mechanic guidance so that blank page isn't as intimidating. And with jam calendars on sites like itch.io, you can comb through and find a jam that both fits your goals and time frame you're looking to work on a new project. They really are a powerful tool to build your game design muscles.
Although they are a very quick way to expand your skill set, they are also exhausting. Pacing yourself on the number of jams you join per year is a must. When I first entered into a jam, I was hooked. My first Ludum Dare was a mess, but it was fun. I wanted to do it more, so I participated in the next six consecutive mini-Dares, which were tiny monthly jams. Needless to say, I burnt myself out by the sixth one. In order to get myself back into balance, I took a few months hiatus on game jams. If you want to participate in jams, great! In your preparation for the jams, make sure you're giving yourself enough recovery time between jams, and possibly more importantly, time for real life, too. Designing games is fun, but you're human and need to take care of yourself first.
One objection to the concept of game jams is the competitive aspects of them. You are technically competing either against your last jam or others, if the jam is rated. That can be overwhelming. I get it, competing, coupled with the short time frame to get your game out is intimidating! It can easily force you into a grindset that can and will quickly exhaust both your enthusiasm and your will to continue. Game jams aren't for everyone. That doesn't mean you don't need to iterate on your design skills, though. It just means you need to find a lower impact way to get your iterations in. You can still use a game jam as inspiration, especially if the blank page problem plagues you, like it does for me. Pull from game jam themes, or use sites like https://letsmakeagame.net/game-jam-theme-generator/ to generate a theme to work with. There are also jams that focus on mechanics instead, if that's the way you prefer to work. Once you have that figured out, you need to design the game. Avoid putting code to your project at first. Really dig into your game and flesh it all out, noting each mechanic, a list of artwork needed, story beats that need to happen, et cetera. Once you have that laid out, you want to set a deadline. This is important because you're going to need to make an endpoint where you need to put the proverbial pencil down and walk away from it. And if you want to design games, walking away from a project *is* as skill. Learn to manage your game projects and stick to what project manager-you laid out. You need to make multiple games and finish them to be a full-time designer.
One other way to get iterations in without using external prompts is to revisit previous designs. There's no shame in going back and taking another iteration on one of your previous designs. It does require you to have previous designs, however. Make sure you write down game ideas and key mechanics whenever you have an inspiration. That way you'll have a design backlog to work from. Once you have that backlog, be it previous completed games or just ideas, there are a couple of ways to revisit a design. You can wipe the slate clean and redo the work from the ground up. You can also pull the previous version of your game and do a combination of refactoring and augmenting your previous work to expand on it. Both approaches have merit and drawbacks. The clean slate approach allows you to build up a new structure, bringing in the lesson from the previous iteration to make a potentially stronger framework. The augmentation approach allows you to practice revisiting previous work and getting back into the mindset when the old framework was designed. Obviously, if you are only working off of one of your design ideas, then you really are just looking at it with fresh eyes and will need to start from the ground up. Whichever method you end up doing, you'll still need to go through the whole process that I previously described.
And remember that whichever way you choose to build a game, stick to it. You need to build and finish games. That's the designer iteration cycle. Each game needs to be taken to it's logical conclusion, even if that conclusion ends up being dropping the game and retiring it to the backlog. Getting too attached to a given design puts you at risk of stagnating and putting you that much further away from going full-time as a game designer. If your goal is to go full-time, you need to have your portfolio. And in order for that portfolio to be built, you need to complete games. Building one game *technically* makes you a game designer, but if you want to make a career of it, you need to have more than one. Like in the TV and movie industries, the best known actors are the ones that are in a lot of shows and movies. The same applies for game designers, especially since games are a hit-driven industry, too. You need to start making your portfolio to show both the skills you have and the style you've developed as you design games. If one of the methods you choose to build games doesn't work, try a different one. There's no shame in abandoning approaches or tools that don't work for you. At the end of the day, it's only a failure if you both didn't learn from it and it caused you to quit. Trying again and again is what distinguishes a real designer from one-shots.
Anyway, that's the main thrust of what I wanted to cover in this Side Quest. As always, if you want to ask a question, leave a comment, or commiserate with the challenges of designing games, you can reach out to me on various social media with my handle of jcsirron or leave a comment on this episode. I am curious what your experience has been in the industry, be it from a hobbyist perspective like myself, or all the way up to a project manager on a project overseeing hundreds of people working towards a triple-A title. This has been an Adventure Mechanics Side Quest and I hope to talk to you next time.
