Read This Before You Watch Game Design Videos

Hello, Im Osman from InEv Games. I am medical doctor, scientist and academician. And also I am a part time game designer. I’ve been creating my own fantastic universe, making rpg games, board games, and doing game design since 2019. Making games is a serious bussiness and I think it must be based on knowlege. So, lets start.

Making game is a long journey. Its usualy said that the game development time will be between six months and three years. Lets multiply that by two. Because, you know, you can’t always have the same motivation. And there are always unexpected setbacks. So if you want to make your first indie game, probably you must be ready to spend at least nearly two years. I mean, if you have a team. If you want to make a game alone, you must be ready to spend minimum four years. Of course you can make a game alone in six months. But it’s very likely it won’t be a good game. You will not be new Toby Fox or Eric Barone. You will be one of the milions of people who thought they would be one of these.

Anyway, let’s imagine that you set up a small team to make your first indie game and you will do it for 2 years. Then, you decided to watch some videos about making indie game. You are full of motivation. You started to make a platform game. Like everybody. Everybody! It’s like there are no platformer game, so you decided to make a platformer. Ok. It’s your decision. You spend one year and then you realized that something wrong. You were so confident at first, but after one year of devolopment you no longer feel same. Because you’ve learned. You realized that you made too many mistakes. There are too many mistakes in your game. What should you do at this time. You can stop developing and give up your dreams, like too many people who share same fate as you. Or you can start over. This is a difficult desicion to make.

Dunning Kruger Effect

But, why did you end up like this? Let me explain something. The Dunning Kruger Effect. It tells us that people with low ability in a particular area (for example game devolopment or game design) tend to over-positively evaluate that ability. So, if you want to make you first indie game, probably you are at the top left of the graph. About a year after you started developing, as your knowledge in this field increases, you realized that you don’t actually know that much. And than, this results in insecurity and giving up.

So, to avoid this, I would like to give some starting advice. First of all, you should spend at least six months for researching and learning. Don’t try to make a platformer right away. Learn basics. I mean basic basics, real basics. For example what a game is? Homo Luedns shows that the beginning of everything human on earth was game. You should know what this means. Because if you don’t know the basics of what you’re doing, you believe what everyone says. You cant tell the truth from lies. In the end, your game is a bad copy of other games.

In this blog, I will recommend learning tools I using. I want to make my journey wise. I started my own game studio. We are about 10 friends now and none of us make money from this job. We all have another job to live. And I choose my team from very smart and enthusiastic people, so I’m sure we will succeed in the end. In the team, my responsibility is a game design. I’ve been training myself for 6 months. I wont tell everything I did but I will give a few recommendations. In other videos we can look at each in detail.

Book Recommendation

For fisrt step, you may want to read Homo Ludens from Johan Huizinga. It is about what the game is. Read it, you will be suprised. And then you may read Actionable Gamification from Yu-Kai Chou. It’s about Octalysis model for gamification. I highly recommend it if you want to give players motivation for your game. And last, you may read Flow from Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. If you want to keep your players in the game, if you want to make a fun game, you need to know what the flow is.

While reading these books, you can also check out these Youtube channels. These have helped me a lot. Jonas Tyroller, Masahiro Sakurai on Creating Games, Game Maker’s Toolkit, Going Indie, Extra Credits, Ask Gamedev, Adam Millard - The Architect of Games, Design Doc and IndieGameBusiness. These are very helpfull and serious channel about game development.

And then, after you choose genre for your game. You have to play too many games from this genre. But it’s not enough to just play, you have to take notes from those games. You have to analyse the mechanics, dynamics an esthetics. You should read good and bad reviews of these games, especially the bad reviews. And not only video games, you should also play board games. Board games are very helpful in understanding game mechanics. You can get a lot of inspiration from these games.

And besides all this, you need to start building a community. Marketing starts when you decide to make a game, not after the game is finished. You can start a YouTube channel like I’m doing now. Or you can try your luck on social media like Reddit, Tiktok, Facebook etc. Because having a community means both a potential customer for your game and friends who will test the game, give advice, and contribute to your development. For example, you can look at our social media pages from the descriptions.

I dont want to make this article too long. In the next article, we can go into more details about these things. My name is Osman and I think game design is a craft, not an art, so anyone can do it. We just need to understand what we are doing from the most basic level. And I want to learn this with you.