In the course of making games for over 20 million players—based on popular IP like Game of Thrones and Star Trek—I learned a lot of lessons. This is just a few of them, although this includes some of the most painfully learned lessons.
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BIG PRINCIPLES
- Every "rule" in gamedev has a great exception
- You probably won't be the exception
- Hard: Shipping; Harder: Shipping fun game; Hardest: shipping fun that scales.
- Shots on goal (trying ideas, shipping, iterating) matters most
PHASES OF PRODUCT
- You can only build 1 game vision; converge team & purge fiefdoms
- 0 to 1 is about shared vision h/t @chrisheatherly
- Data is everything in the Live Ops stage; velocity of insight -> product improvement is predictor of success h/t @albertsupdates
PEOPLE
- Be wary of hiring people who harbor deep reservations about making money
- Be very afraid if the team building the game isn’t playing it
- Toxic / abusive team members suck
- Cynical team members suck
HIRING
- Many people will say nearly anything to land a job at a game studio
- Hire optimistic people because game development is incredibly hard
- Work with people who want to make a great game right now more than anything else in their life
TEAM MIX
- Great teams with experienced craftspeople are foundational
- Adding fresh blood who need to learn/prove (e.g., interns) has a high ROI and better connects you to current culture
- Live Ops teams who run great games are usually not right to build a NEW game
FEATURES
- Smaller is almost always better than larger
- But “large enough” is even more important
- Replayability is gold
- It is better to cut mediocre features
MARKETING
- For mobile games: what Kotaku says doesn’t matter
- Meta critic score is one of the worst-designed metrics that exist
- App store featuring will not save you
- The sins of design will not be countered by marketing spend
TOOLING & TECH
Tools need to be native to the user (Unity for programmers, spreadsheets for designers, website forms for PMs, etc.)
- Manual processes suck
- Don’t build backend yourself
- Don’t build a 3d engine
- Technology prowess doesn’t win
PRODUCTION
- Games look like a mess until at least 90% done
- People think they are close to 90% when it's actually more like 50%
- It will take longer than you think
MORE ON VISION
- Reiteration of the Vision is a constant effort; don't take for granted
- Create the simple definition of what’s important
ITEMIZATION & ECONOMY
- Good shop design is critical—needs as much attention as any other part of the game
- Getting a rare item should be clear and awesome for the player
- Don't cap the size of your economy / monetization
- Pay attention to what people buy
UX
- Show your game to people IN PERSON, and take lots of notes on what happens when they play
- Pay attention to how performance scales as the size of data (inventories, etc.) grows
INNOVATION
- Innovation is good for capturing new markets, attention to craft craft is good for capturing established ones
- UX is often the difference between good and great
- You can’t really “lean startup” a game because too much of it is based on a complete experience
NARRATIVE
- Storytelling on mobile must connect with the audience within seconds
- Narrative != Dialog
- Narrative is represented through game systems
- Humans find meaning through story
DATA
- Instrument everything, you’ll probably want the data at some point
- Make it easy to access data
- Dashboards that don’t display actionable intelligence might be cool but aren’t useful
PLAYERS
- Love your players. (Contempt for players is doom)
- Players will speed run content faster than you expect
- Your most valuable cohort will probably be the people who show up in the beginning.
- Optimize single player experience before multi
DON'T PANIC
- Don’t panic if things look like a mess for the first 80% of the development timeline
- Panic if things look like a mess when you’re about to ship :)
CURIOSITY
- Team members should be really curious about what successful games like yours have done before
- Pay close attention If people on the team are experts on your target audience, and they don’t like the game
MORE ON PLAYERS
- Your most vocal players are good to listen to, but be careful because they’re not necessarily representative of your market
- Even bad games have their fans
CURIOSITY
- Team should be really curious about what successful games like yours have done before
- Pay attention if people on the team are experts on your target audience, and they don’t like the game
- Be wary of know-it-alls.. unless they've shipped top-revenue games🙂
MORE ON PLAYERS
- Your most vocal players are good to listen to, but be careful because they’re not necessarily representative of your market
- Even bad games have their fans
VELOCITY
- Any feature that depends on more than 1 programmer will be exponentially harder and riskier to implement
- The best features can usually be prototyped in days if not hours
- Code in the fewest languages possible, ideally just one
LICENSES
- Aligning incentives is critical
- Licenses can break through noise when nobody else does it; when everyone does it, worse
- Avoid over-licensed IP
- The IP biz dev person’s incentive is usually short-term (annual bonus) your incentives are long term (decade+)
MONEY
- Debt for UA is like taking treasure from a pit of vipers — more ways to die than win
- Biz models that work in largest games may not work to scale your much-smaller game
- Be wary of backers long on money and short on gamedev experience
- Your forecast will be wrong
SHIPPING
- It is better to delay than ship before it is ready
- But it is better to ship before you run out of money than not ship at all
- If you can’t ship before running out of money, the culprit is probably that your scope was too great—not that the capital was too small
FINAL THOUGHTS
- If some stuff on this is contradictory, that’s OK. Games contain multitudes.
- If you haven’t failed in game dev you haven’t been at it long enough
- When someone declares the future of games, it usually isn’t
- Fear is the Mind Killer
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