Hacker News Reader

Comment by AJ007 | Hacker News Reader

You need to make multiple games and think about what did and didn't work. Very few developers it was their first game. The early PC developers were pumping out multiple games a year.

While it won't help with real time games, Building Blocks of Tabletop Game Design: An Encyclopedia of Mechanism, will get you thinking about game mechanics.

If you want to make social games, then read The Lessons of Lucasfilm's Habitat http://www.fudco.com/chip/lessons.html There's also 21 years of blog posts worth reading here http://habitatchronicles.com/category/general/

Also don't signup-gate web games, players need to be able to play them instantly, without an account.

View on HN

I just read a great quote about this in an Italo Calvino novel:

"If I think I must write `one` book, all the problems of how this book should be and how it should not be block me and keep me from going forward. If, on the contrary, I think that I am writing a whole library, I feel suddenly lightened: I know that whatever I write will be integrated, contradicted, balanced, amplified, buried by the hundreds of volumes that remain for me to write"

Italo Calvino was noted as being of great inspiration to Jonathan Blow (as a relative point of interest on the OP's question)

I think during one of the Braid 20th anniversary podcasts[0] he talks to it which I loved listing to (from a historic viewpoint; well moreso than a game dev/design)

[0]https://open.spotify.com/show/7t7FUL1e9vMCLWpKqcknAL?si=B_Bd...

Your gems are in the back of the stack: [shit, shit, kinda shit, sorta shit, gem], gotta keep popping the stack.

That’s a thought-provoking point. Sometimes I feel like I push myself too hard in the process of building stuff.

In this spirit of practicing and making multiple small games before a big one, I find the 20 Games Challenge[0] interesting. It's a list of known games sorted in increasing difficulty to reproduce, introducing new concepts progressively.

[0]: https://20_games_challenge.gitlab.io/

Thanks for the interesting link! I’ve got to take a look at it

Not a gamedev myself, but I think playing a bunch of board games is huge— the complexity constraints for a board game are way tougher than they are for a computer, so designers (the good ones, anyway) are really forced to consider if each new resource, token, turn phase, victory condition, etc is really pulling its weight in the final product. The mechanics have to be ruthlessly stripped back to be just what is absolutely essential to make it work. Games like Patchwork, Santorini, Azul, Carcassonne, etc are a master class in this.

A computer can be doing mountains of bookkeeping behind the scenes, and that not only obscures what is actually going on from the player, but it can make the designer believe they have "depth" when all they really have is an overcomplicated mess.

Watch YouTube channels where board games are taught, and pay attention to the structure of a video like that— it's "you play as X in setting Y, your ultimate goal is to Z, and along the way you're going have to A, B, and C to achieve that. The game will end when conditions Q are met. The hook that makes this game unique is that ____."

A video game (especially an indie game) should be able to pitched exactly as succinctly as that.

This is an approach I’ve never thought about before. Studying board games could definitely teach me how to design games in a simple and effective way. I’ll check out the board games you mentioned too, thanks!

Thanks for the good resources and comments, I’ll definitely check them out!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com