3 projects - 6 lessons

Hello everyone, last month I finally completed my 2-years game design course. Today, I thought I’d share some things I learned during the projects I worked on during my first year. Our teachers assigned a prize for the best game, so for each project I will share two lessons, one I learned while working on my game and one I learned looking at what the best project did well.

Project 1

Take a class of dreaming just inscribed fresh students. All of them came to that school to fulfill their dreams, to create the next big thing in gaming, to revolutionize the industry. Take all these people and assign them as their first project… Pong: recreate Pong with a twist.  It’s pretty obvious that many of us went a bit overboard with the ideas and tried to force our cool visions onto a project that didn’t allow them. I think the most important lesson of this project was exactly what our teacher wanted us to learn by assigning us Pong: “Always strive to make more with less” and the best project really encapsulated this idea. This is one of those things that I really hold close to my heart, as they become relevant many many times during game development. What fascinates me the most about game design is how much simple things can be tapped out to create a lot of interesting gameplay and in my games, I always aim to make depth and complexity emerge from very simple elements or few mechanics.

As for my project, we made “Dungeons and Pong”, a version of Pong where you could pick up a class and gain special abilities. This project had a lesson that is deeply connected to the other: “don’t use variety as a key feature”. The idea is that, especially when you are low on resources, you should avoid making content and options as the core of your game. Variety should be added on a solid base that works alone, otherwise you risk having to cut some things due to budget or delays and end up with an underwhelming project.

Project 2

For our second project, we had to create a first person simulator of a profession but with a gameplay/narrative twist of our choice. 

The lesson learned from what ended up being the best project is: “A polished simple game is better than an unpolished cool game”. It is a simple lesson, but very important, because we often forget that polishing really can take an immense amount of time and has to be accounted for from the beginning. A polished game also has a very good onboarding, something that tends to be overlooked when developing a game.

As for me, I ended up making an escape room, where I learned many things about puzzle games, with the most important being: “Puzzle games are clear and simple games”. When making a puzzle game, designers often have the temptation to make it complex, mysterious, and impossible to understand. I understand where that feeling comes from, the desire to task players with a mental challenge. Instead, we should remember that our role, for the most part, is to make players happy and feel good about themselves. When making a puzzle game, it is crucial to playtest and make puzzles simple enough to allow most of the people to solve them and make them feel clever. 

Project 3

Finally, the last project of our first year was a mobile sports game. This time, my team was the one who won the Best Project prize, but I still have two lessons, one specific for our project and a more general one. 

First, what did we do right? I think the most important lesson is “Build the toy first”. This is something also found in The Art of Game Design, but, as always, you have to try the things yourself to really learn something. We made a mobile version of chase tag, where tag meets parkour, and one player has to catch the other. Our game was fun to play from the beginning, before the special abilities, the characters, the assets, the level design. Simply moving the characters inside the map to chase or evade was super entertaining for all the people who tried it. Then, we could add all the content, the skills and cool things on a solid base (you can see there is a unifying thread among all of today’s lessons).

As for the general lesson, I think the biggest takeaway is “Be passionate about what you do”. Many of us didn’t love the idea of making a mobile sports game, and I think the projects where the team was more passionate about what they were doing ended up with a better result. We are not always in the situation where we can choose what to do, but we are game designers, and it is our job to make others happy. Without passion, it is very hard to do this job properly.

Ciao!

That's all for today, see you next week for another article. Hope you can apply some of these lessons in your games!