But you do not become a game designer, level designer or game writer without relevant experience. Video Games And The Door Problem by Liz EnglandĪs both Mullich and England describe in their articles, there are of course roles in this industry dedicated to “coming up with things”. Sorry, There Is No “Idea Guy” Position In The Game Industry by David Mullich If you want to be involved in making games, you have to actually start making games. This is not a real position, and definitely not something someone can do simply because they think they can think good. Without coding or art knowledge, they dream of being the one who makes decisions, calls the shots, and writes the game design document. It has become something of a running joke in the game industry that amateurs think they can be the “idea person” in a team. In the vast majority of cases, you will be better off by starting with a single player game. To make an online game, you still need to learn and apply all the basics of game development, but with additional worry about servers and communication between devices on top. If you start from scratch however, adding any sort of online component is a huge complication. If you are coming from an IT background and already have experience with network engineering, making an online game may be what comes naturally to you. You want to make an online game as a beginner. Thinking that a project is your “one big thing” can be incredibly counterproductive for motivation, and lead to creator’s block. Make small things that you kind of like doing, not one big thing that your whole heart is attached to. If you’ve been thinking about making your own horse game for a while, you may have a ‘dream project’, a magnum opus that you think will define you as a creator, that will be your very own masterpiece. You tie your identity as a creator to this one project. Focus on one thing instead, and get that right. But as a newbie creator, it is not your responsibility to fix every aspect this genre fails at.
It’s easy to dream about what the ideal horse game should have or do. You want your project to be everything you dreamed of.
Your first game should be something you can finish in a day. Don’t start a game project that will take you a decade to finish.
If I asked an aspiring game creator what sort of game one person can make in a year of full time work, they will probably think of a project that actually took five people three years to make. A beginner does not yet have a feeling for what is feasible and what takes how much time. The most common problems I see among amateur developers trying to pour their passion into a horse game are: I still learn new things every day, but I believe I have a bunch of useful advice I can give to beginners. With five years of industry experience, I may not count as a veteran yet – although that threshold generally is disturbingly low considering the high rate of burnout.
Thanks to a generalist education in Game Design at Zurich University of the Arts, I know some basics of every aspect that goes into creating a game, from code to animation to user experience to business and marketing. I have seen, played and evaluated the value of hundreds of games, made by everyone from hobbyist amateurs to ambitious students to industry veterans. I have been part of university juries for admission interviews and bachelor exams in game design. At my day job at AirConsole, I have been in a Game Producer role for several years.
These tips are based on my own experience in the game industry, and hearing the stories of hundreds of game developers around me, both in online communities and in real life. If your goal in working on a game is your own personal journey, rather than producing a complete experience that others will want to play (and pay for), then this article might not be for you.īut as soon as your fantasizing about the game you’d like to play becomes a more concrete plan for something you want to make, finish and perhaps even sell, there are valuable considerations in order to keep things realistically feasible. Not even to discourage anyone from dreaming big and perhaps never finishing anything. Before we begin, I want to make it very clear that my goal is not to discourage anyone from making a horse game.