How Bad Design is Ruining My Indie Game | devlog
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- Опубликовано: 28 сен 2024
- I have spent nearly 2 years working and reworking the same systems. But I have nothing to show for it.
Today I talk about the importance of planning and designing, and how falling into the trap of perfectionism can ruin the progression of your game.
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Some good videos on Game Design Document Creation:
• The easiest game desig...
• Game Design Documents ...
An example of a simple Game Design Document from an actual game, (Reign Check by Toasterface Games) : docs.google.co...
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Look at it in a good way. if you look back at old work and don't find any issues with it, you haven't improved
Oh completely agree- so easy to get stuck on those systems though and never move forward with actual content. But definitely an overall positive thing :)
@@GarnetKane That is really my main reason why I stopped making games by myself. I can only concentrate on optimizing for some reason, so other parts of the game like the art, game design, audio etc. will get lost. So I decided to only work with other people to implement single systems or editor tools, thats what I can do best. I am defenetly not a Game Developer
Hey! Don't sell yourself short - at my job, my role is actually Tools Programmer, so I'm definitely in a similar boat of skilled in creating systems/tools, but I definitely still have enjoyment in other areas even if I'm not incredible at them just yet. If you enjoy making a game, and can find some balance between creating systems/developing the game and optimising, then definitely never drop that! You may be able to create some incredible things in the future :)
@@GarnetKane Thank you
I'm not a developer at all, but I related so much to this entire video. I started my own business about a year ago, and my hyper fixation on optimizing each process to achieve a cleaner, better client experience, reduce redundancies, improve data visualization, streamline workflows, etc. etc. etc. ad infinitum, ad nauseum. It's been an exhausting year... I will say that I'm starting to feel content with more areas as of late. So, I'm hoping my obsessive iteration processes are beginning to approach a point where I can just do the work, instead of the work multiplied by whatever amount of time it takes to refine the whole system. I hope the same for you with your project! Good luck.
First off - congratulations on the business side, that sounds like an insane leap so hats off for even jumping into entrepreneurship. Really respect the respect you have for clients as well and focusing on their experience, that would definitely make you stand out in any business and I imagine a lot of people would love to work with you.
The perfectionism of every minute detail, even if it really only matters to you, as much as it can cost time/money etc., it's a testament to a lot of the commitment and care that you put in for your work as well.
Thank you for the kind words as well, and best of luck on your journey! :)
As a game developer you likely have more insight than most and you mentioned that there are plenty of videos on yt of how to build design docs. Are there any that you feel stand out as particularly good examples?
Hey! Really great question - I've just linked some videos that I thought were particularly useful in the description of this video. I also linked an example of a simple GDD from a game that I found online - it is a very simple document, and I think a more thorough document (think 15 full pages +) would best convey the ideas behind the design, but it's a good place to get started to see how other people are doing it as well
I find the best way to avoid bad design is just to take an open project (from github or asset store) as base and build on it. You might not understand why things were designed in certain way at first, but then you will learn its brilliance.
this makes 0 sense
Ah yes, these open projects that you know for sure are totally perfectly designed by famous competent programmers..
@@DrTheRich you have to choose the better ones, for example, open projects from Unity Technology are made by extremely competent devs.
To be honest, hearing your story, i dont think bad design is ruining your indie game, its thinking your design is bad (because its only 99% perfect), thats ruinig your indie game...
Yeah, indie Devs are known for their perfectionism
Hmmm that's definitely a good way to look at it. I talked a bit about the 'need for perfectionism' but yeah it's a lot of just what's going on on my own end
LIKE... it sounds like you could use an ECS pattern lmao
I actually did a bit of research going into this project and somehow ECS never came up as a result. I had a read through the wiki for it and it actually does seem like a perfect implementation. Definitely seems like something that maybe Binding of Isaac had used
wow, I can see so many problems in here:
- you're doing everything on your own - the art is bad - why no use of art pack / pixel artist? there are cheap ones out there
- no use of scriptable objects from the beggining? ehhh
- overscoped game size for the time beeing - without required skills you can't complete game alone
- stubbornness instead of dropping this idea for something very small - like game jam game
- recreating mechanics over and over and over - low skills issue
- prototype first - simple yet engaging prototype is better instead of adding details to big game and later changing everything after first iteration of playtests
3 tips:
- smaller games
- take a part in the game jam
- watch the video The 100 Games That Taught Me Game Design
Huh and here I was thinking the art looks pretty unique and cool
Hey! Really appreciate the comment and suggestions, and although I do agree with a lot of your points, I think it's important to remember that for some people, me to an extent included, the process of making a game and learning about different parts of development or what you can and can't do is the journey itself.
I love the process of making my own art for example because its another skill that I'm constantly learning and developing, and for me, the second I outsource that or just purchase something from the asset store, then immediately the project will no longer feel like my own - and like I said, I'm just out here having fun and learning along the way so I'll definitely be making mistakes here and there but that's also the beauty of it!
Thank you so much! I'm glad you like it :)
@@GarnetKane sure thing, I will keep an eye of your projects :) good luck
this is some dedication
hahaha honestly, I’m having a lot of fun with this project. even if it doesn’t have much to show yet, knowing what’s going on in the backend is super satisfying and it’ll be really cool once it’s all put together… eventually :p
@@GarnetKane i wish you the best looks like you structure you project in a interesting way .
Code is never perfect. If the code works for your game and isn't riddled with bugs in gameplay, it's usually good enough to keep. Code what you need and hack the edge cases. If the edge cases are too frequent, maybe there's an underlying problem. But at some point you have to accept it and put in the hard yards of implementing everything you've created. It's not glorious but it's necessary.
Definitely - and I think my struggle is/was largely knowing when to just accept it as it is and only touch it if it doesn't work. It's been a very repetitive process of, fixing something that's not actually broken. I'm still reevaluating parts of the project, but definitely taking into consideration what I need to prioritise moving forward hahah
Dude same, Im going throught the exact same thing I Make something Get Better Then keep iterating.
Such a struggle hahaha - a testament to our own growth, but it takes the toll of never actually getting anything done!
Experiment before you go into a big project, not while you are doing the project. I write songs and when a song doesn't work out I just move on to work on another song. Eventually I end up with 30 to 100 full fledged songs/jams/sketches. Then I start matching the songs to see if they work together on an album(around 12 songs usually). What that means is that I set aside and sacrifice a lot of cool ideas to refine the pieces that work(together). a couple of average ideas that really work together as a game is better than one great idea with less great ideas to make it work. Games have so many parts that need to work together, you can't hyper focus as a solo dev on one great mechanic.