Thoughts from a Hack Game Developer

I’ve been reading about different ways that people go about designing games, and one of the concepts that really stuck with me was ‘If you build your game with X, you tend to get X.’

What I took away from it was, the way you design something will show up in the final product and your users will know. Be it a game, a book, software, or anything else creative.

This got me to thinking about how I design my games. I feel like I take the “whatever works”, sort of haphazard approach. I’ll be playing a game, watching a movie, or in the car, and I’ll get an idea and run with it. There’s nothing approaching a formal method I use to build games, nothing like rules engines, systems for diagramming decision trees, or anything sophisticated. The result is that I generally get a game with a cool concept, and some pretty good mechanics, but not a lot of cohesion between the pieces and certainly none of what the kids call ‘Polish’.

I’m basically the Amateur Hack archetype of a designer. The kind of guy a game publishing company would probably laugh out the door. I’m cool with that.

But still, sometimes I wonder – maybe if I used a little bit more sophisticated methods for building a game, then when people played the game, they’d say “this game is really tight, the rules are totally balanced and polished.” Yeah, whatev. I’m not trying to build polished games. I’m out to make fun games. You know, the kind of games that make me all psyched up. The kind of game that makes me want to make more games.

Some of my friends were really excited when my games came out. Not just because I made them. In fact, some people were pretty skeptical at first. They were just humoring a raving lunatic at first. But they were genuinely excited the first few times through the game.

And to me was saying that the premise was strong. Subsequent plays found parts of the games to become a mix of bland, predictable, complicated, or inconsistent. Over time the more annoying aspects started to stick out worse than the good things. -- The games weren’t polished. The players wanted the crap that I’d glossed over in the first iteration fixed.

That’s easier said than done.

I’ve found the things I do to create a new game are quite a bit removed from the tasks and methods used to tighten up a game.

At any rate, I need to figure out how to get better at the tightening up part of game development.

If I come up with something, I’ll let you guys know.