Category: Game Development

LD33: Yeaaaaaaaah! I’m in! #LDJam

Post author By Gianfranco Berardi
Post date 8/21/2015

I’m in.

Here’s my pre-compo checklist for Ludum Dare, the 48-hour game development competition that starts tonight and ends on Sunday.

I’ll be using C++, libSDL2, CMake/make, the awesome sfxr by DrPetter for audio, my own basic code base, my prototype toolkit, and a secret ingredient: love.

Last time, I did a terrible job of pacing. I focused on creating bad art instead of designing a game, even after I said I would do the opposite.

So this time around, I’ll be focusing on mechanics. For real. I’ll prototype and focus on getting something playable as quickly as possible, and I will iterate on the design so I can feel confident that I will have something to submit by the deadline.

If I need art, I’ll force myself to use circles and rectangles, or I’ll make a quick doodle, take a picture, and turn it into a sprite without worrying about cleanup.

I’m looking forward to making a game with you.

Well, not with you. I’ll be working by myself. But at the same time as you make yours.

As usual, I’ll be cross-posting between here and the Ludum Dare blog.

Good luck, everyone!

Game Development Geek / Technical

My History of Game Jams, Part III #LDJam

Post author By Gianfranco Berardi
Post date 8/21/2015

I’ve been writing about my lessons learned from past game jams. In a few short years, I’ve gotten better at finishing more ambitious games, and yet I still had a lot to learn.

If you didn’t read them, see my history of game jams part 1 and part 2.

Mini LDs
Between the major Ludum Dare compos, there are monthly Mini LDs. Usually someone hosts it and has the option of specifying special rules.

Apparently I didn’t blog about the mini compos I participated in. My favorite is from MiniLD #6 in 2009, which had the theme Monochrome and the special rules that you could only use a limited palette of colors. The idea was to combine all entrees into a single game. The other special rule was that each entrant also got a theme. I got Guardian.

I’m not sure how the final result turned out for all the games, but my game was Guardian Fish. I didn’t even plan on participating that weekend, and yet I put together something that people have told me would make a great game for the growing iOS market if I fleshed it out.

In 2010, right before Ludum Dare #18, I hosted MiniLD #20 with the theme Greed and the optional theme of Fishing with a special rule: “Only one of each.” While programming usually makes it easy to make exact copies of objects, I was insisting that everyone had to ensure there was only one copy of any object.

While there was some griping about the constraint, there were more entrees in this MiniLD than any before it, even though a power outage and my project’s overly ambitious scope meant I didn’t get my own game, The Old Man and the Monkey Thief, done in time. I should have paid attention to my own compo’s constraints and adjusted the scope to fit it instead of trying to create a bunch of content to get around it.

I wrote up a post-mortem of MiniLD #20, including both my own project and running a MiniLD.

It turns out that people want closure and it isn’t enough to simply start a compo and disappear.

My favorite piece of feedback:

I must say there were times when I wanted to stuff that glass of juice down his throat.

You can’t buy memories like that. B-)

It’s also when I met McFunkyPants on the Ludum Dare site for the first time. He’s a pretty awesome game developer, game jam enthusiast, and author, and he runs One Game a Month, an awesome challenge now in its third year.

Full-time Indie Jams

The MiniLDs are great practice for the main compo. I missed Ludum Dare #19 due to the holidays, but I was sure to be part of Ludum Dare #20. At the time, I was struggling with how long Stop That Hero! was taking and I wanted a quick win.

The theme: “It’s Dangerous To Go Alone! Take this!”

Ugh. Really? The meme won? Fine.

I had the initial design I went with right away, prototyping it and eventually making it happen, except I didn’t get it done in 48 hours, so I once again took advantage of the third day of the Ludum Dare Jam to submit Hot Potato!, a game of delivering a package while avoiding the agents trying to grab it. You can pass the package to an adjacent courier (the “take this!” part of the theme).

Once again, simple graphics meant getting things done more quickly, although I didn’t get nearly as much done nor as quickly as I would have liked.

It would be over a year before I would participate in another game compo. Ludum Dare #24’s theme was Evolution, the Susan Lucci of Ludum Dare themes that never won until it did.

I managed to have something playable very quickly, and I iterated the development well. I didn’t get everything I wanted, but when the 48 hours were up, I had something fairly solid to submit instead of trying to rush something that resembles game play at the last minute.

It turns out that Ludum Dare had been getting quite popular, and it has been hard to get people to rate games. In the past, you were given a random list of 20 games, and you were expected to do your best to rate at least those games. Now, they introduced a coolness rating, which increases as you rate other games, and it’s value determines if other people see your game when they get their random list of games that need a rating.

I didn’t plan on setting aside time to play and rate games, which hurt me in this compo.

In my post-mortem of Ludum Dare #24, I wrote:

If I could do LD#24 over again, what would I do differently? I’d spend more time upfront trying to create a design better suited for the theme that is also simple enough for me to make. I’d make sure my list of tasks was prioritized so that at all times I was working on implementing something that served the core design. And I’d make sure that I had set aside time after the compo and Jam to rate other games. People worked hard on their entries, and with over a thousand of them submitted, it’s unfortunately easy to get buried. I think the coolness rating does a great job of making things fair, and the name is perfect. I want to be cooler next time.

Another Long Absense Before the Next Compo

But it would be another two years before I participated in another game jam. By this time, I had a day job again, progress on Stop That Hero! was indefinitely on hold, and I had spent some long and dark evenings figuring out what direction GBGames should go in.

And I apparently forgot my previous game jam lessons.

I came up with a lot of ideas for Ludum Dare #32’s theme, An Unconventional Weapon. Some of them were used by other participants to great effect.

I loved the idea I ran with, though: getting a giant monster to follow your character so you can lead it towards your enemies while avoiding death yourself.

My strategy was to doodle when I wasn’t coding, and rather than use my poor digital art skills, I would use my less-poor pencil drawing skills and digitize them.

And then I threw out that strategy for some reason and tried to create sprites that face four directions, taking up the lion’s share of the time I spent on this compo.

What’s worse is that while the animation helped, it looked worse in screen shots and didn’t look much better in motion. So all that time I could have spent on actually getting game play in was wasted.

It was hugely disappointing Ludum Dare compo for me. You could say I was rusty, but I handled my pacing badly and focused on assets instead of game play.

At the time, I was hard on myself and felt like it was proof that I still suck at game development. On the other hand, a few years ago, I would never have been able to quickly put together the limited game play that I did. I had a character that moved where you clicked in a very intuitive way, which is something people complimented me on, and I had a monster that you could attract either by getting in its vision or yelling out to it. The animations helped make it easier to see where the monster was looking, but I could have simplified them and had something working much faster.

So to be fair to myself, yeah, it sucked I didn’t submit a game, but I’ve come a long way from FuseGB and my first game jam.

Immersed Learning Experiences

My time working as a full-time game developer were definitely very good in terms of how much skill I developed and experience I earned in a couple short years, but the next best thing is a weekend dedicated to creating a game.

When you fully immerse yourself in the work, and when the constraints are that you need to have something finished in a short amount of time, you don’t get to procrastinate or be idle. You don’t read how to do things.

You spend your time doing.

And in the end, you have either a completed game that never existed before or experience to leverage for next time.

Getting that game finished is a great feeling. You get to point to a real game and say, “I made that. I’m a game developer. I developed a game.”

I’m looking forward to the next game jam. It’s another opportunity to grow with an entire community of game developers.

Game Development Geek / Technical

My History of Game Jams, Part II #LDJam

Post author By Gianfranco Berardi
Post date 8/20/2015

Last time, I talked about my first ever game jam and my first year’s worth of Ludum Dare events. After many years of thinking about it, it was nice to finally get some wins under my belt as well as a couple of good lessons. If you didn’t read it, see my history of game jams part 1.

My second Ludum Dare year

April 17th, 2009 was the start of Ludum Dare #14. The theme, Advancing Wall of Doom, was announced while I was out at a party for way too long, which meant I got a late start.

I remember thinking about something along the lines of Rampart, and eventually settled on a design in which you are trying to capture resources with your walls while preventing your opponent from stealing them. I had some neat design ideas and concepts, but almost no code after the first 24 hours. Oof.

Back then, Ludum Dare had medals for each category, and not only can your game be ranked, but the fun side competitions were the Community and Food compos. I got gold for my food pictures, and it was the only reason I submitted anything, because when the deadline hit, I had nothing else to show for the weekend but a button you could click.

Since I was writing everything from scratch, and my previous attempts had either keyboard input or paid attention only to mouse movement, I learned how hard simple GUI elements such as buttons were to implement. It turned out that they have a lot going on under the hood.

I really wish I had written a post-mortem for this failure, too. I think it would have been insightful today.

That year’s August, Caverns was the theme for Ludum Dare #15. I had a good idea right away, and I ran with it.

I took advantage of some new prototyping lessons I learned from Ian Schreiber’s free Game Design Concepts course, and I think I was able to put those lessons to good use. The final game had a lot of help getting finished because I spent some time figuring things out with paper and wooden pieces.

My Mineral Miner post-mortem shows that rapid prototyping works well, and writing good, non-buggy code would help too. Graphics and sound are great for polish, but a lot can be done with terrible placeholder art. I also need to work on my pacing so I’m not wasting time figuring out what to do at any given moment. With only 48 hours, every minute counts. Even though I took in a soccer game and still managed to get a game finished, I could probably have used those few hours to make things better. I would try to make sure my calendar was blocked for for Ludum Dare weekends from then on.

Full-time Indie Game Jam

I missed Ludum Dare #16 and #17, but Ludum Dare #18 was a special one in my heart. It was the first one I participated in as a full-time indie game developer. In 2010, I had quit my job earlier that summer to be an independent game developer, but I had no dream game I was trying to make. When August came, I knew I was participating in Ludum Dare.

The theme was Enemies as Weapons, and I normally don’t like to think about the potential themes before it is announced, this one was standing out in my mind. I wanted to make a reverse Super Mario Bros in which you were Bowser sending Goombas and Koopa Troopas after the AI-controlled hero. I had just been learning a lot about game artificial intelligence, and this kind of project would be perfect for putting it into practice, except I would then also have to learn platformer physics.

So I changed the concept to a reverse Legend of Zelda, in which you were sending out minions to stop the hero from storming your castle and destroying you.

I spent some time coming up with other concepts before settling back on the reverse Legend of Zelda. My prototypes look very much like the end result.

I created a project backlog because I knew this project was going to be ambitious. I was making an epic game.

As my Stop That Hero! post-mortem says, I missed the original 48-hour deadline, but luckily the 72-hour jam compo was introduced and so I used my Monday (because I was full-time indie and could use my days however I wanted) to finish the game.

I spent too long on the UI again, and I had to scale back on my ambitions, but I was very pleased with my casual strategy game. Unfortunately, the jam compo wasn’t very popular then, so not many people played or rated my game, but the October Challenge proposed by Mike Kasprzak was coming, and now I had a game I wanted to make. I made this game in 72 hours. What could I make in another month?

It turns out that it took me another year to make Stop That Hero! into a more fleshed out game. Oof.

More Game Jams

I was a full-time indie by this point. I had all the time in the world to participate in game jams, but I also had to do work that brought in money. What did I do next in terms of game jams?

I’ll write about it next time.

Game Development Geek / Technical

My History with Game Jams #LDJam

Post author By Gianfranco Berardi
Post date 8/19/2015
2 Comments on My History with Game Jams #LDJam

If you want to be a game developer, you need to develop games.

And when I look back on what games I’ve made, I realize that most were originated during game jams. What follows is a trip down memory lane with links to my game jams of the past, complete with links to post-mortems. Those are hard-earned lessons learned from a game jam veteran, kids.

2005: Game in a Day

Garage Games used to host the 24-hour game jam Game in a Day. I participated in my only Game in a Day on June 10th, 2005. The GID theme was Fusion, and I came up with an ambitious design.

I’ve been warned by TomB in #gameinaday on irc.maxgaming.net that I really should pick something simple for my first GID. The fact that I feel I need a design means that it is too complicated. Perhaps he’s right, but we’ll see how I do.

It would be an ambitious design for me today to complete in a 48-hour game jam such as Ludum Dare. I was young and naive, I was not very knowledgeable about the programming language or the 3rd-party libraries I was using. I had no experience with pacing in game jams. Even so, it seems even this early I learned a lesson that would serve me well to remember:

About 10 hours later, I finally have the main character moving about the screen according to the arrow keys. He only moves in four directions, but I’m not going to draw up more images for diagonal movement this late in the GID. I’d rather spend my time getting the fusion part of the game going.

Smart move, Self from 10 years ago!

What I recall most vividly during this jam was an overwhelming sense of fear the likes of which I have never known before. Early in my 24 hours, I started worrying that I didn’t know what I was doing and wouldn’t be able to finish, and I felt like I should quit. Logically, I knew it made no sense, that if I stopped, then it was a self-fulfilling prophecy, but it was a cold, numbing feeling I couldn’t easily ignore. Fear is the mind-killer, the little death that brings total annihilation, and I was apparently facing it head-on for the first time in my life.

But I did it! My first game jam ended with a playable game, the creatively-named FuseGB. It does not resemble my design at all, but I pushed forward and managed to make a playable game in 24 hours.

I gained a lot from my Game in a Day participation, including first-hand experience I never had before that would serve me well.

2008: Ludum Dare

Three years later, I was getting ready to participate in Ludum Dare for the first time, back before it had a dedicated domain name.

Even though I spent a lot of my precious development time trying to get basic infrastructure together, I had a finished game with six hours left to polish it up before the deadline. I purposefully picked a simple set of mechanics so I had the best chance of finishing. While today’s Ludum Dare competitions see thousands of entries, in 2008, there were 70. I earned my first LD trophies in this compo, including my prized “Amazing Pickle Sandwich” award from HybridMind and The “Thanks for Epilepsy” Award from keeyai.

You can read my Ludum Dare #11 post-mortem for Minamilist, which eventually became a slightly better game Walls and a short-lived Facebook game called Sea Friends. It even inspired Maximalist, a game by pansapiens I enjoyed.

Later that year in August, the 12th Ludum Dare compo started with the theme Tower with the optional theme of Owls. I had successfully submitted games to two game jams, so I went in quite confident. I was also dabbling in test-driven development at the time, and I thought that a timed competition was the perfect time to practice my TDD skills.

Ludum Dare #12 was the birth of the ridiculously obtuse Towlr games, but I managed to submit what amounted to a tech demo. It had an owl, and a lot of people were inspired by my user interface. I got “The Palm Of RSI Prevention” trophy from Hamumu for it.

But it wasn’t a complete game, and in fact it had bizarre bugs, such as the enemies climbing up the tower into the sky and getting stuck. As you can see, apparently I thought this bug was a good thing to show in the screenshot.

There was no way to lose, and no way to win. According to my Ludum Dare #12 post-mortem for Tower Defender, I wrestled with technology more than with game development, something I still struggle with because I insist on doing everything from scratch instead of using existing tech.

Months later, coinciding with the Winter Olympics, Ludum Dare #13’s theme was Roads, and early on I had a concept that I saw to completion.

These design notes eventually turned into these guys:

driving around in this game, Road LOCKDOWN!:

I find this odd, but somehow I never wrote a post-mortem for this game jam. The final entry post and development time lapse don’t really say much about what happened, but I recall getting the game finished and submitted at the very last minute, getting “The Photo Finish” trophy from Doches. The game earned me The “I Can’t Get You Because You’re In The Bike Lane” Excuse trophy from demonpants, poking fun at how you have limited controls available to steer only at intersections so your squad car and the criminal’s car can be driving towards each other but in different lanes of traffic.

But the important thing is that I finished a playable and complete game again. That’s 3-ish out of 4 game jams, and that ain’t bad!

More Game Jams to Come

Thanks for reminiscing with me. Rereading my old posts reminds me of how far I’ve come.

Soon I’ll write up what happened in the next year and beyond!

Game Development Games Marketing/Business

You Can Now Start Submitting Your Games to IGF 2016

Post author By Gianfranco Berardi
Post date 8/3/2015

The Independent Games Festival is now accepting submissions for next year’s awards.

The deadline to get your game submitted is October 26, 2015. Other key dates to pay attention to:

Early January, 2016 Finalists Announced
March 14 – March 18, 2016 Game Developers Conference 2016
March 14 – March 15, 2016 Indie Games Summit @ GDC
March 16 – March 18, 2016 IGF Pavilion @ GDC
March 16, 2016 IGF Awards Ceremony (Winners Announced!)

There are a few changes this year.

Brandon Boyer is stepping down as chairperson of the IGF, and Indie MEGABOOTH’s Kelly Wallick is stepping in.

The cost to entrants has changed in the interest of making the IGF more accessible. Instead of $95, the submission fee is now $75.

Similarly, now that student submissions are eligible for the main prizes as well as for the Best Student Game Prize, their fee is $25 instead of being free.

The other major change is in developer feedback.

Developer feedback has always been an optional part of the judging process and in general, having the game played in detail by multiple judges takes precedence over providing written feedback. While the feedback is well intentioned, without having a clear structure it is often inconsistent or on par with what a normal user playtest would provide.

So we’ll be removing written judge feedback – at least for this year – to concentrate on further optimizing the judging process, getting people playing as many games as possible and formalizing the feedback system.

The judging process had been under question in recent years. With the number of IGF submissions getting almost as popular as a Ludum Dare game jam, it was a lot of work for the judges to cover all of the games in a timely manner. But some developers found that their games weren’t even being played in the first place, and it wasn’t clear if everyone was getting a fair shot, especially after paying a submission fee for the privilege.

A more formal feedback system could only help.

How do you feel about the changes?

Game Development

You’ve Decided to Make a Game; Enjoy the Process

Post author By Gianfranco Berardi
Post date 7/30/2015

You made the decision.

You’re going to make a game. You’re going to create a piece of entertainment of your own, whether it’s just something for you and your friends to enjoy or something you intend to publish and make available for a wider audience.

It’s easy to get stressed. Even the simplest games can be a major undertaking.

But you’ve made the decision. It’s going to happen. You are going to finish a game.

And since the end result is known, there’s no point in stressing about it.

In the meantime, enjoy the process of getting there.

You are participating in the powerful act of creation. It won’t necessarily be easy, and there will be a lot of detailed decisions that you’ll make along the way. It might take longer than you expect. You might get sick of it before you’re done. Game development is real work.

But try to have fun with it. You know you’ll get to the end result eventually if you keep moving in the right direction, so makes sure you enjoy the journey.

Then make sure to tell us all about it. B-)

Game Development Marketing/Business

The Great Gatsby Was a Flop; How’s Your Game?

Post author By Gianfranco Berardi
Post date 7/23/2015

Yesterday while listening to an audiobook, I learned that F. Scott Fitzgerald died thinking that his greatest work was a failure.

He earned just $2,000 from The Great Gatsby. In today’s money, it represents a bit more, and he was in the top 1% of income earners in his time, but this was his major novel. He put a lot of blood, sweat, and tears into it, but he got paid the same as or less than he did for his short stories. How depressing!

Now, there are different definitions of success, and financial success isn’t everything. But Fitzgerald expected Gatsby to be a huge financial success and was disappointed.

Today, the work is taught in schools, which is how I became familiar with it. I had to write a paper on the novel as part of my high school English class, and I remember someone saying, “Hah, good luck! That’s the teacher’s favorite book.”

So I made sure to do my research well. I even read the book twice before writing my paper early enough to be able to edit it instead of trying to get it all done on the last day. I got an A, and I found I quite enjoyed the book as well.

Incidentally, I learned that The Great Gatsby is still not in the public domain, despite the author having been dead for three-quarters of a century.

The audiobook mentioned a number of Fitzgerald’s peers who are widely recognized today as geniuses as well, but when they actively published, they experienced modest financial success. The very financially successful literature was apparently kind of terrible and written by authors who are all but forgotten, but people couldn’t get enough of them.

So what’s the lesson here as an indie game developer?

No one has it easy. Fitzgerald was a popular figure, and his greatest work still couldn’t find traction with the public in his lifetime, despite the praise he got from fellow writers.

Most people look to the great successes for inspiration. What was Howard Schultz’s secret to success for Starbucks? How did Mark Zuckerberg make Facebook the juggernaut it is? See what Notch did with Minecraft?

They are all human. They all failed somewhere. Some found great financial success, while others didn’t.

We don’t often hear about the failures of successful people. We forget about the struggle and look for the glamorous.

Then we look at our own results and worry we don’t measure up. We think we’ll never be great ourselves, because we don’t recognize that our failures are exactly the same kinds of failures that the successful people had.

When you publish a game, it’s entirely possible that no one will find out about it. You pour your heart and soul into a game for months or years, and it could flop. Meanwhile, you see other games take over the world and hear that the developers made them in a few weeks in their spare time.

You see huge and successful indie games, games that get all the press and sales, and you compare your efforts to what you perceive as someone’s effortless genius. It can be heartbreaking and frustrating.

Some of us stop bothering to try.

But failure is part of the process of succeeding.

Ideally, you get to success while you can still enjoy it. You just need to make the attempt and get past the failure first.

Game Design Game Development Geek / Technical Personal Development

How to Find Indies in Iowa

Post author By Gianfranco Berardi
Post date 7/21/2015
2 Comments on How to Find Indies in Iowa

When I started out as an indie game developer, I found a home on the Internet. It was a set of forums dedicated not just to game development but also to making a living from it.

And while daily online communication, or maybe just procrastination, was helpful, it was nothing compared to the monthly face-to-face meetups we had in Chicago. We met either downtown at a Dave & Buster’s or at a Starbuck’s in Schaumburg.

It was kind of a loose mastermind group, in which we tried to set goals for the next meeting and held each other accountable to them. We had a range of completely newbies to experienced and successful business owners, and we all met, tried out each other’s games, and gave feedback.

So when I moved to Des Moines, Iowa, I immediately wondered where a similar collection of indies were.

They’re hard to find, so I decided to put a summary on this page in the hopes that it will be easier for everyone to connect with groups they might not have otherwise known existed.

The Iowa Game Dev Friendship Club has a mailing list at https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/igdf. It’s made up of indies and enthusiasts from all across the state of Iowa, especially out of Ames and Iowa City which is where our major universities are.

There is now an associated Iowa Game Dev Friendship Club Facebook group.

Sometimes a good number of members show up at a game jam, but otherwise they don’t try to organize massive face-to-face meetings. There have been Des Moines-area meetups in the past, such as the Midwest Mingle.

If you’re in Ames or Iowa City, your local university has a game developer organization. Iowa State has the Iowa State Game Development Club, which has an enthusiastic Twitter account at @isu_gdc and a ISU Game Dev Club Facebook page.

University of Iowa in Iowa City has EPX Video Game and Animation Studio, formerly known as Animation and Interaction at the University of Iowa. You can find them at their weekly meetings and at their EPX Facebook group.

UPDATED 2016: The International Game Developers Association has a Des Moines chapter. You can find them on Twitter (@igdadsm) and Facebook (https://www.facebook.com/groups/227434834257939/.

Did I miss anyone? Is there an Iowa indie game developer meetup you’re hosting that I don’t know about? Let me know, and I’ll update this list.

Game Development Personal Development

Setting Effort-based Goals vs Outcome-based Goals

Post author By Gianfranco Berardi
Post date 7/16/2015
3 Comments on Setting Effort-based Goals vs Outcome-based Goals

Since I am a part-time indie game developer, I am highly aware that the time I spend on game development tends to be a very significant function of my output.

If my other responsibilities are great, and I don’t consciously make an effort, maybe I’ll only get a couple of hours of work in. No matter how efficient I could use that time, two hours a week isn’t going to let me accomplish much. I can’t prototype or play test much, nor can I really get much implemented.

So all year I’ve been setting goals to increase this amount in a sustainable way. That is, I make sure I can handle my day job, my family, and my home responsibilities while also ensuring I get enough sleep. Stealing time from my sleep, for instance, allows me to temporarily use that time productively, but it always catches up with me and I end up paying for it in the end. What usually happens is I get slower and less efficient, and then I start sleeping in, which takes away my precious mornings that I dedicate to game development.

Recently I’ve been rereading Steve Pavlina’s book Personal Development for Smart People: The Conscious Pursuit of Personal Growth, and in the chapter on Power, he talks about personal quotas.

The idea is that to increase your performance in an area of your life, you can set minimum daily quotas to reach. Some authors set a daily word count. No matter how long it takes, they must write 250 words. Or maybe they do what I’ve been trying to do and set a minimum number of hours since word count might not represent the effort of writing very well if they spend a lot of their working time researching or editing, actions that don’t necessarily increase their word count but still contribute to the finished project.

Pavlina said he used to dedicate a few hours to writing, but he found that the end results weren’t ideal because his focus was on putting in the time instead of finishing. So he focuses on outcomes. Instead of writing for two hours, he writes until he finishes an article.

In a way, this reminds me of the Theory of Constraints and the story told in The Goal: A Process of Ongoing Improvement. Eliyahu M. Goldratt’s protagonist is put in charge of a failing manufacturing plant.

This plant has very expensive machines, and so the company insisted that to be the most efficient, those machines should be running as close to 24/7 as possible. Downtime meant lost efficiency and wasted opportunities to make back the investment in those machines.

Here, they were focusing on effort.

What they forgot was that the effort should serve a purpose.

People weren’t buying what was being made, either because they produced too much, or it wasn’t the right product for their needs, or the finished product couldn’t be made because there were bottlenecks in the manufacturing process in which some parts were ready while others needed to wait to be made. No matter how efficient the plant was in utilizing their resources, all they ended up with was a warehouse storing the unsold and unneeded parts they were creating.

Once they started to focus on the finished product, the outcomes, they rearranged priorities, ensuring that what was being built at any given time was shortening the time of the entire process, not just making any one part more efficiently.

I just spent the last couple of months implementing what was supposed to be a “simple” physics model for a game I’m working on. It turns out, physics isn’t simple, and there are plenty of solved problems in this domain, as well as many available 3rd-party libraries such as Box2D. But no, I insisted on implementing my own. I don’t need an entire physics engine. I just need something that looks good enough. How hard can it be?

In terms of my personal education, I gained a lot. I consulted a number of resources, such as the Impulse Engine by Randy Gaul and Chris Hecker’s Physics articles for Game Developer Magazine. I had a refresher from my high school and college physics classes, plus I learned about ways in which physics engines in games have historically fallen on their faces.

But in terms of outcomes, that’s two months I spent implementing and tweaking a small part of my overall game project. I focused on spending time on development, and I just kept working on what I was working on because I didn’t ever feel I had a good stopping point. It’s easy to want to spend a lot of time fiddling with coefficients and parameters to see if I can get the feel just right.

If, instead, I really focused on outcomes, such as getting the physics implemented in a week, maybe I would have seen that I was running out of time and so decide to use a 3rd-party library.

It doesn’t matter if I wrote the code myself. It matters that I am a step closer to having customers play the game.

Some game developers keep a simple list of tasks in front of them, and they work on whatever seems interesting, adding and removing tasks as they go. Others have a full project plan.

Now, as a part-time indie game developer, time still means results. If I spend 10 hours in a week, I am able to focus more than if I spend two hours in a week. It can mean the difference between getting meaningful accomplished in a given development session versus starting and stopping over the course of weeks to get something equivalent done.

So time still has a huge effect on output.

But I can do a better job of ensuring that the time I do spend on game development isn’t open-ended. There’s always more work to do, so just putting in time to work isn’t necessarily going to result in all of the work getting done so much as just a portion of the work getting done really, really well.

Game Design Game Development Personal Development

Anyone Can Create, and They Do: Your Design Choices Matter

Post author By Gianfranco Berardi
Post date 7/13/2015

I used to have a QBasic game review site, which meant I was part of a small group of sites dedicated to playing and reviewing games made by a small community on the relatively young Internet.

Surprisingly that effort translated into a little bit of paying work when I found out that Game Tunnel was looking for reviewers. I got a little bit of money each time I wrote up what I thought about a specific independent game, plus I usually got the game for free. It wasn’t enough to quit my job and live off of it, but it was enjoyable.

Over all that time, I saw a number of review sites come and go, and every so often one of them would get the idea to do a special write-up on “the worst games of [insert year here]”. Anyone could publish a review site,and sometimes that meant anyone did, and they decided it would be fun to write insults for laughs.

Now, I get it. In many creative industries, there’s always a “best of” list, and there are awards shows dedicated to highlighting the top efforts. So why not a “worst of” list? Why not highlight the terrible? People love to hate on things.

In fact, I didn’t know this, but the Razzies, which highlight the worst in film, have been around since 1981. It’s all in good fun, and it’s actually gotten relatively popular, with a few celebrities coming to accept their Golden Raspberry award in person.

If you search on YouTube, you’ll easily find lists of the worst games.

That’s unfortunate ad placement, huh?

People love to hate on E.T. for the Atari 2600, or John Romero’s Daikatana, or any number of games based on movies.

Ok, so people love to hear about failure. The popularity of reality television already tells you this fact.

I personally think this kind of tear-down is the stuff of tabloids. It’s never something you’ll find at the Academy Awards or The Academy of Interactive Arts and Sciences. And this isn’t a complaint about high-brow vs low-brow. I’m not above a good slapstick comedy or the occasional mindless action game.

It’s about ease.

In the modern age of citizen publishing media, with blogs, videos, and social network posts, anyone can write about how much they hated the latest stinker at the box office or a terribly-written-yet-popular novel or a disappointing offering from a major game publisher.

And many do.

But what a terrible way to spend your time! Dwelling on the negative, insulting people you don’t know, and kicking them when they are down? Ick.

It’s also easy. Someone could spend months or years writing and rewriting a novel only to find an online mob ready to hate it upon publication. One cleverly-worded Tweet of criticism, and it can start an avalanche of hate. Because of groupthink, these “Yeah, gee, it’s so awful!” comments can even come from people who have never read the work in the first place (again, see E.T. for the Atari 2600).

It’s one thing to critically analyze what makes something bad. You can comment on the inconsistent plot, or the dated graphics, or question the message. You can say it is derivative and unimaginative and compare it to earlier efforts, such as when my friend Ian Simmons wrote his review of Pacific Rim and compared it to Independence Day. It takes effort and experience to understand why something is bad and to be able to communicate it, and it comes from a desire for improvement. It’s a teacher giving a low grade on a creative writing assignment with the note, “I expected more from you.”

But it’s another thing entirely to slam something without giving much thought to it. At best, it’s a drive-by insult. At it’s worst, it’s bullying. It’s more about the humor of a good put-down than about seeking improvement. It’s the teacher who hates teaching because he despises the students and has to insult them to feel better about his miserable life.

When everyone has the ability to create, you are going to see a lot of terrible creations, and the ease of publishing means some of these creations get front-page status.

That top 10 worst games video on YouTube got over 2 million views. There was a choice made about what to focus on, and the creator of the video decided, “Yeah, let’s go for negativity.”

That’s 2 million people who got the subtle message that criticism is the same as complaining, who think that it’s normal to highlight what’s wrong with something, who shed at least one point of resistance to expressing an insult about someone or their creation because, hey, look at all those other people having fun at his/her expense.

I’ve been focusing on reviewers and critics, but the original purpose of this post was to focus on the act of creation itself, and specifically about game development.

With the wide availability of high-quality tools and resources, anyone can make a game, and many do.

Some people make great games, some people make mediocre games, and a lot of people make clones.

But some people make games with questionable designs. There was a choice about what to include in a game, and the creator decided that gratuitous violence, casual misogyny, and even downright hate was the way to go.

It’s one thing to make a game about shooting everything in sight when everything in sight is out to get you, like in Space Invaders or Doom.

It’s another to make a game in which the only motivation is death and destruction for its own sake. Here you’re just putting together game mechanics with perversity, and not in a good way.

You could simulate complex interpersonal relationships, or you could go the easy route of hypersexualization, stereotypes, and power fantasy.

There are legitimate arguments and positions to take, and there are careless (or careful) non-positions that do in fact take a position.

For instance, making a game about doing nothing but shooting civilians “just for fun” says something about your worldview and the worldview of your game’s fans, at least in what’s considered “fun”.

It’s a choice.

And with the increased availability of tools and publishing platforms, anyone can make these kinds of choices.

And many do. Sometimes without realizing that they are making important choices.

And some of these choices get front-page status, which means a lot of people get the subtle message that these choices are normal.

It’s why I prefer highlighting the best and get uncomfortable when it comes to tearing down the worst.

Because focusing on the worst is easy. Anyone can do it, and anyone can make horrible stuff so there is always fodder, but more importantly, it sends a message that focusing on the worst is a good use of time, that it’s innocent and fun to dogpile on someone after they dared to put themselves out there.

It can be petty and mean, and I like to think the wider community can do better.

And focusing on the best means that the creators of purposefully bad creations don’t get rewarded for being horrible or lazy. It means raising something up and saying to everyone, “See what amazing things can be done?”

It means inspiring people to make the choice to aspire to good work, to expect more from themselves.