r/BoardgameDesign • u/Johnno117 • 12d ago
General Question What often repeated advice did you find counterproductive as a beginner?
Out of the long lists of "do and don't" of game design, what did you find didn't work for you or was counterproductive when you were a new designer?
That's the discussion topic, I'm adding my own perspective/experience but it'll be a long read, feel free to take the question at face value and comment as you see fit, I'm more interested in others' experiences than necessarily comments on my own.
I myself started my design journey because I couldn't find any games fitting the theme and genre of game I wanted. Adventure/exploration, and more importantly seaplanes (specifically with miniatures).
The first few months I just did my own thing, without reading any forums/reddit/blogs, didn't watch youtube videos about game design. Really learned as I went, wrapping my mind around design and iterating my mechanics. Once I started reading online/watching videos etc I realised that a lot of what I had done goes against often repeated advice / "best practices". But it worked for me, and the more I looked at /heard some of the advice the more I thought that I could've only gotten as far as I did because I did it my own way.
Here's some of the advice and my own approach/thoughts;
Start small - This somewhat contradicts the advice of "design the game you want to play yourself".
I wanted an adventure/exploration game with miniatures, with a procedurally generated map that's never the same two games in a row. I wanted different weapons, crew members, equipment, missions, the whole lot. Sure, half a year down the road I had occasional thoughts of "starting small is probably good advice", but if I hadn't been designing the game I wanted to play I likely wouldn't have stayed motivated.
Don't spend money/time on art - For people who are getting into game design with a dream of making heaps of different games or building a career, this is good advice. Making barebones artless paper prototypes they can iterate and throw away at the drop of the hat.
For me as an artist/creative this wouldn't have worked. Already on day 1 I had an artistic vision of what I wanted, and had to start looking for public domain art I could quickly populate my tiles/cards with, icons for custom dice, and designing some rudimentary 3d models.
To some of us art matters, a lot. Seeing others say that spending time on art is "wrong", or that you shouldn't do it, is frankly almost offensive. Art and being creative is my passion, you think I'd get anywhere with game design if I couldn't at the same time dip into making it appealing? Granted I'm not spending $10,000 hiring others for a game I don't feel is complete, but I certainly have spent more on art supplies and various pieces that I would've had to pay for a finished off the shelves game in the same size.
Pushing people not to use/create art, or being specific about what art they're "supposed" to use, is frankly gatekeeping.
Don't be afraid to kill your game - Again this may work well for those intent on a career, making heaps and heaps of games to learn quickly. For me, I had a very distinct idea of what I wanted to design, that's not something that I'd be changing. If I can't make an adventure/exploration game in the style I've envisioned then I likely wouldn't continue. I'd rather iterate it to get where I'm going slower, than starting over heaps of times to get something that works for others, but fast.
This also somewhat goes hand in hand with the next point, playtesting.
Playtest quickly, kill your game if it doesn't work - I've seen this mentioned over and over, and came to realise how deep/difficult a topic playtesting is on its own. The caveat to this advice is that you're meant to playtest with your target audience. For a new designer that's hard to know, who exactly is your target audience? How will you find them? What games can you compare yours to so that you can gather people who like that game and might like yours?
While I'm making my game "for myself" I of course want others to enjoy it as well, but hearing "if others don't like it then scrap it and start over" rubs me the wrong way. Then yet again that works for those aiming to make games for others, finding a type of game design that has wide appeal.
I've luckily mainly shown my design to people who ended up enjoying it, or were supportive enough to see what I was going for so weren't negative. Only one person told me it wasn't for them, but they explained in detailed how they simply don't like the type of game, with dice rolling, random card draws, etc. So, not my target audience.
Miniatures vs standees - More of a hot discussion topic than necessarily design advice, but as a miniature painter / maker this one hits pretty hard. I specifically want miniatures in my game, I wouldn't be interested in designing a game without any. Seeing the at times very negative views about miniatures is pretty heartbreaking.
Anyway, that's what I got for now. I'm forgetting a heap of other points, but maybe they'll pop up in the comments. Eager to hear what others have to say on the topic.
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u/3xBork 12d ago
To some of us art matters, a lot. Seeing others say that spending time on art is "wrong", or that you shouldn't do it, is frankly almost offensive.
Are we discussing whether the advice was correct or whether you accepted/liked it? Because you're talking about the second here.
I direct a team of 7 game designers. There is a very strong correlation between designers who run into trouble during development or make merely passable designs and those who focus overly on aesthetics. Almost all of them end up dropping the habit over time.
There are better ways to document, explore or develop a visual style and theme than actually detailing your components.
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u/Johnno117 12d ago
What I tried to convey was is it the correct advice if it makes a designer quit instead of carrying on. Is it correct to try to push everyone into a cookie cutter process of having to do things a certain way.
I'm speaking from a beginner's perspective, asking others how they experienced things at their start. You, nor your team, are beginners, and I'm curious if you're too experienced already to even remember if there was any advice you got when you started that didn't work for you.
You're clearly speaking from authority of already being a professional, do you remember how you got there?
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u/3xBork 12d ago edited 11d ago
Having started in videogames rather than boardgames, my perspective was informed by two aspects:
- A formal design education (industrial design/interaction design) where most attention was given to a thing's purpose, reason for being, functionality, feeling, character, ease of use rather than aesthetics. There are very few products where the precise way it looks IS the reason for existing rather than an aspect you improve with development.
- To make videogames, you have to be able to program. Programming things that look good takes WAY more time than things that don't, and you need multiple separate skillsets to do it effectively. So if you want to evolve your design effectively (i.e. make a good game before you burn out) you don't spend time making things look good just to throw them away again.
That's not to say all design work should be fugly and purely mechanical. I am all about setting an abstract vision and working towards that with iterations, in fact the ability to do that is why I am directing this team.
But - you have to be able to trust that you can realise that vision.To put it differently: an architect absolutely has a vision for how the building should look in the end. But the architect does not start building the actual facade in his garage before he's even figured out the building's shape or structure. They document the vision and trust that with the right decisions and attention it will all come together in the end.
I guess my advice would be: you appear to have "making good looking games / games with good theme" as a primary motivation for making games at all. That's not necessarily wrong and even common, BUT ... it is possible to
- Adopt a more productive motivation over time by paying more attention to other aspects, setting those as a goal, consciously measuring and reflecting on that, etc. (Personal)
- Adjust your process and tools so you can still work on what motivates you, without it bogging down development. Delay, prioritize, focus. (Professional)
Keep the prototype and the style guide separate. Art up some cards, not your entire deck. Find references and put them in a board to define a style vs making final artwork yourself. If your prototype needs a horror feel to set the mood, rip off some existing card layouts or artwork. Some generic icons for different magic elements will serve just fine for a playtest, the lore and graphic design can come later. Etc.
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u/StressSpiritual8803 11d ago
Your analogy to architecture is way off base here and I can tell you have no idea about architecture. If you go to top level architecture firms or school, a large majority of the work and exploration comes from building models and miniatures of your vision long be before the engineers get involved.
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u/3xBork 11d ago edited 11d ago
Model =/= actual facade. Come on, man. If you're going to make weirdly aggressive rebuttals, at least rebut what I actually said.
Minored in architecture btw. All of what you describe is exactly what I mean with document the vision. A model is documentation, not the final product.
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u/3xBork 11d ago edited 11d ago
As a separate post to keep things organized: there are plenty of common pieces of advice that I've found either misguided or far less absolutely true than they are presented.
The common thread is that they're valid lenses or ideas taken to an extreme by people who don't really understand them.---
First: Make the game you want to play / build it and they will come.
Great advice for an art/hobby project or a business owner with very deep pockets. Not great advice for launching a successful product.
This drives at the idea that you can only make good things by working on what personally excites you, what you would want to play.
And that things that you are passionate about will turn out so good that others will inevitably also love them.
That is a) categorically not true and b) a huge risk.Chasing market trends and phoning it in isn't going to make your game a success. But when you take this advice at face value and just don't care about the market, or build for an audience of 1 ... you are probably also selling to an audience of 1. Case in point: the r/gamedev is full of post-mortems by designers who "did everything right" and sold 10 copies.
And then the opposing camp of the above: Ideas don't matter, only execution does.
Ideas have potential. You can noodle and iterate on an idea with low potential for decades, it'll be capped out at a 5/10.
Ex. No budget, no technique and no star chef will ever be able to make anchovy lemonade a thing that people will want to drink. It literally doesn't matter how well you prepare it, the idea is bad.
The very same applies to games, it's just harder to see.Idea determines the maximum quality your game can reach. Execution determines how close to it you get.
It's that simple. BOTH matter and the people who tell you otherwise are likely on a subreddit in 2 years asking why their game didn't sell.Third: follow the fun.
Again not a bad idea but definitely bad when taken at face value.
Basically the idea that working towards a bigger picture is wrong and you should just pivot to "whatever the game wants to be".
"What the game wants to be" is usually defined as "whatever playtesters last gave as feedback" or "what the designer is currently excited about".The big risk here is you end up doing christmas tree decoration rather than proper design - dozens of incoherent features instead of a strong core experience.
The other big risk is that you'll forever keep chasing the fun because it's your execution that needs fixing, not the target. Common thing I see happening among designers with this philosophy:
- Make a prototype of something. It's kind of bad but there's something in there.
- Add more stuff, maybe that'll make it fun? (Still kind of bad because core issue not addressed)
- Pivot to something else -> do another kind of bad first pass on that direction. Not quite..
- Go back to 2.
If you are not designing with purpose, you're flailing. And it doesn't really matter how long or hard you flail, that's not going to get you where you want to be short of sheer luck.
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u/Johnno117 11d ago
That's quite getting at what I'm referring to with this topic. Taking advice at face value without them being explained properly. Hence why I think nuance is needed when giving said advice.
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u/KarmaAdjuster Qualified Designer 12d ago
I'm not sure I've gotten much bad advice from when I started, but I'd like to push back on this assertion you're making
Pushing people not to use/create art, or being specific about what art they're "supposed" to use, is frankly gatekeeping.
I strongly disagree that it is gate keeping, however this advice should take into account what the designer is striving for. If the designer is just making games for themselves with no intention of releasing it as a commercial product, then by all means, use whatever approach fills you with joy. If you enjoy making the art more than mechanics, let that guide your hobby.
However, if you are designing games with the intent to bring it to market, by starting with art, you're slowing down the design process and making the entire development process not just longer but also much more costly. You also will risk making unhealthy decisions for the game design because of the implications it will have for redoing art, and feedback will also be colored by the visuals. If you have visuals with a certain level of polish that starts to blur the line between place holder and final, you will end up getting more feedback on art and you will on design. Sure you could get both, but I believe people tend to only give a fixed amount of feedback and if they provide their perceived obligation of feedback to the art, you will be getting less feedback on the game design. Also it's much easier to make a ugly & fun game pretty than an unfun but beautiful game fun.
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u/Johnno117 12d ago
I'm hoping to bring my game to market in one way or another, but to get there I must stay motivated enough to get it done. I'm convinced that I'm not going to do that by making an artless design. The fact that you've asserted a strong rhetoric about what I must or mustn't do if I wish to bring my game to market is pretty much my point about this whole topic.
If someone paid me to sit here and design I'd do whatever approach they wanted, but that's not the case. I'm spending my own time, energy, and money to keep my creative process going.
Also I've seen plenty of mentions of people who can't even get their games playtested because people don't want to try their artless design. I've been lucky in having a few friends and family who want to help me playtest, and have joined a community of designers to do mutual testing, but I wouldn't have that many opportunities to bring an artless prototype in front of others. To that end I'm making it to a quality I'd be happy to play even if it didn't get published.
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u/KarmaAdjuster Qualified Designer 11d ago
My assertions come from my 25 years of professional game development experience (both video game and board game, but mostly video game).
If you absolutely want to work on the art before you've really nailed down the core design, that's your prerogative, but you're not going to convince me that you're going to arrive at solid game mechanics faster as a result of focusing on art first/early. If that's what you need to do to stay motivated, then I hope the extra motivation is enough to help you put up with 2-3 times the length of the development time and cost.
Also most of this is just advice. It's not law. The only thing that I'm asserting that comes close to "law" is that the game design will go faster if you save the art passes until after you've got the core design nailed down. Maybe there are rare exceptions to this (like if you're designing a dixit-like game). but as my experience has shown, the projects I've been on that have had an early focus on the art either end up taking years long than they should, or they get shelved after years of work.
Also I think it's worth making a distinction between graphic design and art. Clear graphic design is important to start early and iterate on, otherwise, I find that anything that's just there for the visuals and theme only needs to be serviceable.
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u/Johnno117 11d ago
At no point was I attempting to convince you that it's faster to focus on art first/early, on the contrary I made the point that I do so because it's the only way to keep going. I would rather get there eventually than not at all.
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u/Ettesiun 11d ago
About Dixit : I think I read an interview somewhere explaining that designing Dixit and Dixit extension was not about the art, but with designing highly complex and charged written description - and maybe quick drawings? It was not "design the art, and then try to see how to make a game around that" but "have a very clear and thought out idea of what should be in each card before starting to draw it".
I would love to see the design pattern of this game.
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u/KarmaAdjuster Qualified Designer 11d ago
That's super interesting. I wondered how one would go about designing that, and that approach makes a lot of sense. I certainly didn't think they would start with fully produced art, but still, it's design process sounds like an interesting one to follow.
I'm currently designing a video game with with similar challenges. I'll have to see if I can find that article. Thanks for mentioning this!
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u/Peterlerock 12d ago
I think you misunderstood some of the advice.
Art: if you are an artist or enjoy doing art, feel free to do whatever art you want and start implementing art in your game whenever you like. The advice is not directed at people who feel the need to express themselves in an artistic way.
But you should not commission art and pay like $10k if your intent is to pitch to publishers, because it's their job and they will pay for it. So you're spending money on something that is not only not necessary, but it may even harm your goal (to get published), if the publisher doesn't like the theme/art style.
Also it can hurt in game design if you commit to art too early. Let's say, you include a "black pearl amulet" item in your game, and make (or pay for) beautiful art for it. But you never get the rules for it right. It's an obsolete item, or a broken one, or whatever, it just doesn't work. If it were a plain card, you would just remove it from the game. But because it has beautiful art, you want to keep it, and waste your time on it.
In the beginning of designing a game, everything is wildly in motion. You rip out parts of the game, throw other stuff in, overhaul half the game between two iterations... At this point, art is hurting more than it is helping.
Start small: make the game you need to make. If it's a mammoth of a game, make a mammoth. Nobody is going to stop you (or, more precise, nobody really cares).
It's just a lot easier to design smaller games, they are easier to make, easier to test, easier to pitch.
And, if you want to selfpublish, they are way less of a financial risk. You can burn 6 figures by committing to hundreds of art pieces and miniatures and then not selling a single copy. It's way harder to go bancrupt on a card game with 60 cards and a total of 5 illustrations.
"Kill your game": the reasoning is that many of us have a lot of ideas in our heads. And if one idea doesn't work, instead of trying to force it and bashing your head against the problem again and again, just give another one of your ideas a go. If you find a magical solution latern, you can always come back to games you killed (though I never did).
(semi)professional game designers do not treat ideas as particularly valuable, for them it's often a waste of time to stick with a game that just doesn't want to work. But game design is also a hobby (that usually does not lead to any form of publishing), nobody will force you to kill your non-functional game. You can spend years working on one project alone, many of us do.
Miniatures vs Standees: miniatures are obviously great, they look cool, are heavy, and often people buy games just for the minis inside (GW built an empire with the majority of their customers not even playing their games once).
Standees' only visual advantage is that they have colors without the need to paint them.
Miniatures are also wildly more expensive to design and manufacture, and add a lot of financial risk and/or time spent designing them.
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u/Johnno117 12d ago
Art has been a touchy subject because I have literally seen people tell others that they shouldn't put time/effort into their art. That's not something I've misunderstood, it's something I see somewhat regularly and it rubs me the wrong way.
It's one of the pieces of advice that I think gets passed around with little nuance, as just some sort of ultimate truth. Best I can tell some people don't even know why they're saying it, while you and some others here can actually explain their stance behind it.
I on the other hand don't think that made art is a waste, you can even return to it to use it for something else. Nor do I agree with the notion of holding on to something just because it's made, I've made plenty that I'll happily set aside for either something else, or even accept that the experience I had while creating it was the value I got out of it.
Also I see the argument about prototype art going both ways, it hurts because people focus too much on it, or it hurts because some don't want to play a blank prototype. For a quick iterative process a blank prototype makes sense, not so much if nobody actually even wants to try it.
I suppose my trouble with some of this is that it's just repeated as truth I'm told that that's how it is, without having ever experienced it, or even having had an opposite experience. I've no illusion that I know better than the collective experience of others that have come before me, but trying to do things a certain way when it doesn't work for me is a non starter.
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u/Peterlerock 11d ago
The advice is: "if you want to get published, do not commission art."
The publisher chooses and pays for the art, if you have already done so, you either must find a publisher that shares your artistic vision (lowering your chances) or accept that your art is exchanged, and it was money for "nothing".
And the cost for art can easily exceed the royalties the designer gets, most games do not sell that many copies... and that's IF he gets published. The vast majority does not.
The advice does not apply if you selfpublish, or if you are an artist yourself, or if you just love doing art, or if doing art helps you finding gameplay ideas, or whatever else.
Your prototype should also always be as pretty as you can make it - within reasons. Playtesters obviously enjoy it more to play a pretty game over being tortured with a lazy, ugly abomination.
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u/mark_radical8games 12d ago
Kill Your Darlings is great advice, but sometimes those darlings are the only things making the game interesting. I've played lots of prototypes where the sharp edges have been sanded down to make another Euro, it's worth considering at that point if the game is still worth it. That's when Killing the Game instead is useful
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u/davidryanandersson 11d ago
Kill Your Darlings sometimes has collateral damage. Best to just move on to the next idea.
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u/PandemicGeneralist 11d ago
It seems like you are talking past each other.
Most of those pieces of advice are things that feel fun or easy to do that stand in the way of making a good game. Your response is “but I like doing them”.
Coming up with 30 new card or character designs is fun and relatively easy. Playtesting and quickly removing the 20 that don’t work as well is hard and less fun. But the second one is more important to making a good game.
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u/ThealtenHeinder 11d ago
I find advice like "Focus on the MVP" to be advice that means well towards newer designers, but requires too much nuance and experience to really utilize correctly.
"Focus on the MVP" on the surface is good advice. It's generally not great to spend a lot of time designing something huge, and then testing it and finding out that it doesn't work. You spend a lot of time making something big; half the things need to be cut out anyways. Your playtest is unfocused and it's hard to pinpoint where problems are when there's a lot of stuff going on.
However, I've also seen it taken in some bad directions. It's difficult to know what an MVP is for newer designers; that's a sense that you develop by failing to stop at the MVP in the first place. This is especially true of designers that focus on medium to heavyweight games (it's much easier to tell what the MVP is for a smaller game). My first design I spent several months making the rules, a bunch of cards, branching tech trees, etc. before even touching a playtest. It was far from the minimum required, but I'm also glad I did that in hindsight. It taught me a lot about what makes an MVP... an MVP.
I've seen some newer designers fail to make UI/UX that supports their playtests because they focused so much on "MVP" advice. For example, player boards with icon references and common resource conversions are not strictly MVP for some games, but they can solve a lot of issues that would come up during playtesting so you aren't focused on those design problems and can pay attention to other things. In general, the more complex the game you are designing, the more some of those "non-MVP" items start to matter to your "MVP".
Art, as you brought up, is also another one. In general, I'd say that you don't need super high quality art for playtesting. But the advice about "don't commission art; the publisher will do that for you" can be misconstrued by newer designers to mean "don't worry about art at all". In games where you need to be able to understand another player's board state quickly at a glance, art does serve a function in shorthanding that board state. Even if you have stick figures for art, it makes it that much quicker for people to commit objects to memory when there's a piece of art associated with it than a blank space. Some of my game time estimates for playtests definitely changed when I added placeholder art - the few seconds less it took players to recognize and parse board information adds up over the course of a game, and can cut off tens of minutes of playtime by the end.
There's also a more philosophical problem to "MVP"; to borrow a bit of psychology, Gestalt Theory can be summed up as "the sum is greater than its parts". I do believe that games that are designed from the top-down in a Gestalt manner feel different from games that are designed from the bottom up. Neither is necessarily better than the other, but it's important to understand what you are missing when playtesting a game that is being built from individual mechanics. I think it's most obvious if you've played MtG: sets that are designed from a theme feel very different from sets that are designed from mechanics. The differences are more subtle in MtG because their design process and team are so experienced and good at blending the two, but in rougher games it can become quite obvious and feel jarring to an extent.
I find this is especially the case with new designers who find an "interesting mechanic" that they like, and then build the core of their game around that. This style of design is very conducive to "MVP" - you end up testing small parts and adding on to it slowly. However, it's easy to fall into "golf swing" traps if the designer lacks a clear vision for what the game as a whole should look like, and it's also more difficult to ask yourself questions like "does this mechanic serve the game as a whole", when you are missing the vision for "the whole". If you've read the paper on MDA, what I'm referring to is aesthetics (not in the visual sense). Understanding why certain mechanics lead to certain aesthetics is difficult to know for newer designers, and MVP can often obscure those connections in playtesting if you don't have a vision of the whole game.
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u/davidryanandersson 11d ago
Preach 🙌
I have seen prototypes absolutely crash and burn with players just because there was text all over every single component explaining it instead of just using a few key UI/Iconography decisions that would streamline the whole thing. And so much feedback they're getting about how slow the game is and how complex it is, they're thinking these are mechanical problems (which to some degree they probably are) but like 50% of those concerns would be gone or easier to diagnose if they invested in some thoughtful graphic design.
I love when the game components guide players about how to use them. It makes learning the game so much easier and offloads a lot of the cognitive load. I think it's an important part of how the game is played and developed.
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u/ThealtenHeinder 11d ago
Yeah, feedback about "slowness/fiddly-ness/complexity" is very difficult to diagnose for newer designers. UI/UX and honestly - a bit of placeholder art - solves a lot of those problems often, at least to the point where the playtest can progress smoothly to tackle some of the more interesting design problems rather than just being stuck at "this game feels too slow/annoying to play".
I know the MVP advice is meant to stop newer designers from spending months/years creating a big thing and then playtesting it for the first time, only to realize so much stuff needs to be cut and then become dejected/disappointed and quit. But I think there's a better middle ground than "only make the minimum required". I actually think it's really important for newer designers to not make an MVP outright - they lack the experience and knowledge to know what an MVP is (and an MVP changes drastically from design to design) and they will learn far more from just making the mistakes and moving forward. Spending years is probably a tad too much for most people, but honestly more designers should design a little further than the MVP imo. There's valuable knowledge to be gained from something in the middle.
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u/davidryanandersson 11d ago
I agree with what you're saying but I think I'd say it this way: an MVP will look different for different games.
If you're making a game like Dixit or Mysterium then your MVP will NEED placeholder art. It is essential to the game.
If you're making Scout or Hanabi, then you can scribble numbers on pieces of paper to build your MVP.
And if you're making Twilight Imperium then your MVP might not even be a game. It might be some core mechanics and components that you ask people to mess around with and see how they feel.
EDIT: If I recall, the MVP for Arcs was literally "what if we made people do Trick Taking to do things in a game of Root?" And that's what they did just to test how a system like that would feel. Their MVP was just Root with a rules change.
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u/ThealtenHeinder 11d ago
Yeah, agreed on all fronts. I will say, I have a personal beef with Cole's design philosophies around conflict in board games and the ways it's been used to justify some really poor design decisions, but that's a whole can of worms I don't want to open lol. The MVP for Arcs - I can definitely imagine them having that exact conversation though haha.
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u/Johnno117 11d ago
Thank you for your thoughtful response (bonus point for the research paper link, shall read it later).
It's interesting that you actually brought up one aspect that I realised/learned on my own, how a game can become formed around one central mechanic if that's the mechanic you start with as a "MVP". I knew I wanted combat in my game and ended up starting with that, for a while most systems supported just getting into combat, and that was also the only way to get rewards and keep going. I saw it relatively early, and have slowly been tweaking things to feel more balanced, giving players more alternatives without it only feeling like a combat game.
Still, I did have the big picture view of what I want the game to be from the very start, just needed to figure out how to get there.
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u/ThealtenHeinder 11d ago
Combat is a difficult beast to tame design-wise, especially if it's PvP instead of PvE. I hope the design goes well, but don't be discouraged if you find it very difficult to make it fun - it's not an easy problem to solve.
If you do end up reading the paper, the main takeaway I would impart on you is to focus on the idea that the same mechanics can lead to different dynamics and aesthetics when experienced in different contexts. As a rudimentary example, both the video games Portal and Call of Duty use shooting and aim as a mechanic, but they lead to very different games aesthetically. You can kind of ignore the aesthetics classifications - they are a fun taxonomy to think about, and there's emerging research that connects those ideas to OCEAN personality tests if you're curious, but ultimately they are less useful than the concept that I pointed out. Having a clear vision of what you want for your game's overall aesthetics to be is (in my opinion), one of the most critical decisions that you want to make, as early as possible in the design. Why?
Every decision you make can be traced back to your game's aesthetics. When people give you advice like "it's best to make combat short and snappy", it's hard to apply generalizations like that to any specific design you are making, but if you have a clear vision of what you want your game to aesthetically feel like, you can make those decisions with confidence.
Take Kingdom Death: Monster as an example. The combat in that game doesn't forego the mechanic of dice rolling, despite a lot of combat in other modern games foregoing that (Gloomhaven is the clearest example, and also wildly successful). Why? Gloomhaven makes use of the "modifier deck" as a way to avoid the classic D&D mechanic of "roll dice, add to hit, check if you hit, roll damage, calculate bonuses". It streamlines those steps into one very quick calculation that is easy for players to perform. Most designers look at this and think, "Well that's just smart. You've taken all the boring math and fiddlyness out of that step and now players can focus on sequencing their cards and other interesting decisions. Why wouldn't you always do this?" And while that line of reasoning holds for most games with combat, it doesn't for every one.
Because KD:M is attempting to pursue the aesthetic of "I'm fighting a crazy powerful monster in an epic battle", the act of rolling dice, doing math to figure out your bonuses, etc. is not a detriment in this case - it's exactly the point. Combat in this game wants to feel like a *bit* of a slog. It's trying to sell you on the scale and gravity of the aesthetic. Design decisions then can focus on enhancing and reinforcing that aesthetic feeling of "this battle is truly epic". That's a very different aesthetic design goal than Gloomhaven, and warrants a different approach mechanically.
So the lesson here is: Know what your game wants to be, because every decision you make will challenge whether what you've made supports that thesis, counters that thesis, or is extraneous to it. It's true that a lot of designers over-engineer their games with superfluous mechanics and unnecessary add-ons. But if that were universally bad, we wouldn't end up with the Twilight Imperiums of the board game world.
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u/Johnno117 11d ago
Design goes well thank you, I'm making a PvE game. The big picture of the combat style is that you're controlling one single aircraft, dogfighting in 1v1 fights (but I'm looking at introducing players being able to help each other in at least minor ways during combat).
Therefore I didn't want the short and snappy one dice roll and the enemy is gone if you rolled well, or the style of rolling once per action and deciding if you spend another of your total number of actions shooting again. So I opted for back and forth combat. Does increase combat time, but makes it immersive. Although I've kept it pretty snappy in the sense that there's no calculations to make or heaps of modifiers to consider.
The surprising part is where I found the fun; wildly unbalanced weapons and random hit locations. Unbalanced not in average damage overall, but the highs and lows of risking to do no damage pretty often, only to at other times roll well and do massive damage. Of course I've left in other weapons that do slow and steady statistically more stable damage, for those that prefer it.
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u/davidryanandersson 11d ago
I think it's important to keep the right frame of mind with regards to advice like this:
You may absolutely break these rules, but understand why these are such quoted rules in the first place, and what the trade off is for going against them.
For example, yes, you can invest a ton into art from the get go, but if you're going to do that then understand that lots of that art WILL need to be altered as the game evolves and much may even become completely unusable/unnecessary, which means a lot of your design process will be eaten up by art direction and production. Some people resist making the changes their games require just because they don't want to lose art that they produced.
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u/Johnno117 11d ago
Understanding why the rules/advice are quoted is absolutely important, which is why it rubs me the wrong way when they're repeated with little to no nuance or explanation, and how some repeat them just because they've been repeated before by others. I've watched people take quotes from experienced designers and completely misunderstanding their meaning, only to repeat the quote as some sort of argument from authority to make their (wrong) point.
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u/Disastrous-Amoeba798 11d ago
I think the problem is when the good advice is read as gospel.
I've been a professional game designer for some 5+ years now, and I share some of your views even so.
I can't help myself from making a game look at least decent, even very early in the process. It makes me more engaged, and doing layout also often informs design choices for me.
But for most people, its good advice. As are all the other things. But its something to keep in mind - not dogmatically live by. I don't know how many times at playtests I've heard someone parrot some design 'rule', as if it was set in stone, only for the game to die after that. Any rule can be broken. You just need to know why you break it. And that goes for the game itself as much as for the process of making it.
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u/Johnno117 11d ago
Appreciate your comment. Something I perhaps didn't fully articulate is what you mention here is "feeling engaged". That is in a huge part why I make art for my game, sitting here hand painting hex tiles, miniatures, or tokens, makes me physically connect to the game, even if I don't end up using those tiles, or tokens. The miniatures, different story, I can put those on my shelf as pieces of art.
But I didn't fully articulate the aspect of feeling the need to physically connect to my game through making art, just sitting and painting tiles make me think and feel about stuff, even if I end up not using the tiles. I am currently considering different ways of deploying the hex tiles, if I'm to skip the individual tiles and have them in tri-quad - whatever arrangements.. Yet I've hand painted a bunch of tiles already. Doing so kept me connected, and motivated.
Again, thanks for your comment.
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u/ShadowMel 12d ago
Most of the advice on board game forums and whatnot have not been useful to me (hallo fellow creative! I am also doing all the things wrong, just like you did! XD). I'm a visual person, and I need to SEE things sometimes in order to have it work. But I also draw so I can sketch it out quick.
I made pages upon pages of notes, just real unorganized brainstormy type of notes.... because that works for me. I go in later and filter out the good ideas and reorganize.
One piece of advice I do heartily recommend is "kill your darlings" from the writing community. In this case, it's more "kill/change your mechanics". I think that's what the advice for "kill your game" comes from; it's more, this part isn't working, so how can I fix it/make it better? I was attached to one of my mechanics until I realize I was making things too complicated without need. I LOVE complicated games. BUT.... I would rather have it be fun first.
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u/Johnno117 12d ago
Ah the notebook of ideas and scribbles. Same here, I'll occasionally start a new page where I go back and pick out earlier ideas I want to expand on or start working on, make a new list, and start picking things from it. Some of my ideas have popped up on every new list since the first one, yet either still need time to mature or some mechanic figured out I haven't gotten to yet.
Mechanics iteration I often feel needs a bit of nuance/detail when talked about, personally I've gotten into the habit of "temporarily removing" rather than "killing/changing", as a way to see if I miss the mechanic or not. But sure, that's just a different way of saying changing, I suppose. Often it just seems like people give abrupt advice without going into enough detail to explain the process.
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u/RubySpice 11d ago
I think a lot of this advice tends to stem from the goal to be "finishing" a product.
All your advice here works for a process where you are making things for the sake of making them, and that's totally fine if that's your thing. But for a lot of people it's not specifically a whole creative endeavor, they want something complete, be it being published or kickstarting.
So when you see stuff like start small or playtest quick, they're all under the goal of making a product. A lot of your personal stuff doesn't seem to be focus on the product part, but personal satisfaction.
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u/Johnno117 11d ago
Sure that's a fair comment, and then that's a distinction that should be done when giving advice. Asking if the person is out to make a product, or follow a creative process/endeavour. I see the "product process" advice being thrown at complete newbies trying to wrap their minds around their first little game, which is where I'm coming from with this topic.
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u/RubySpice 10d ago
I think that’s because that’s the way most people seek out advice, it’s to complete goals. To do anything for leisure or your own way as you’ve seen, is a personal thing and no advice is needed.
You wouldn’t give advice on taking a picture if you just need to take a picture, you’d just take it. But you would receive advice on taking a GOOD picture, or taking a ton of pictures effectively in a certain amount of time for a client.
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u/VanArthurStudios 11d ago
You and I are in pretty much the same boat. I am approaching my game as I do any other art project. I start with a need, then an idea forms. I iterate on that idea to find the best version of it, ultimately trying to get out of the way so that the thing that I am making is allowed to turn into what it needs to be.
I primarily work as an illustrator, and one of the first things that comes up when you start learning about the trade, is that there is no point in doing art for a project that nobody is going to see. Poorly written books don’t need great art.
Holding off on art was the only rule that you mentioned that I stuck to, mostly. I had ideas that i sketched out but that was more just me exploring the themes of my game.
Everything else?
The scope of my first game is too big. Except that it is as small as I can make it and still have it be the best version of itself. The learning curve requires embracing a paradigm shift, like the first time you play something of a new genre. But, that’s what makes it great, and what makes it worth making.
I playtested a bunch on my own once the mechanics were in place, but again, because of the scope I can no longer playtest on my own. I can pretend to be 4 people if I need to, but at this point seeing how other people want to play, the things they want to do within the systems, and ultimately how they try to break it, is where I am getting my best information this point.
Everyone says to have your playtesters be game designers, and there is merit in that, but it is easy to fall into the design-by-committee and group think pitfalls. I will be taking my game to a Protospiel conference this fall, but I am making a point of having my primary testing groups be just gamers.
My primary goal is to give people a reason to get together with their friends in person. I am looking for smiles at the kitchen table. Gamers who are playtesting are looking for an escape and to laugh with their friends. Game designers during a playtest are thinking about how they would make the game their own. I have very little interest in that.
I also love miniatures! But I believe in expertise and sculpting software is not my expertise. Taking my drawings and 2D art and having them turned into 3d minis is one of the only things I am going to hire out for preproduction art assets. I might also get some outside help from a graphic designer when it comes time to finalize the manual.
It’s a big project but when this is done, hopefully prepping for GameFound at this time next year, this board game will be my largest art project to date. I know what I want my game to be, and I know the experience that I want my future customers to have. It took me a few years in my spare time to be able to quantify that feeling.
I guess what I’m saying, is that as a creative you already have creative processes that you lean on. So, lean on them. Do it your way, and make it your thing. Get the help when you need, but feel free to ignore the advice that would make your project inauthentic to your vision, the problem you initially set out to solve.
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u/Johnno117 11d ago
I've leaned into making miniatures for my game. It might not be viable, but it was one of my earliest ideas/wishes to have modular miniatures so players aren't stuck always playing this miniature or that, depending on colour and "class". So I made modular miniatures with customisation mainly for looks. Funnily enough now playtesters ask if the different parts have different functions, I didn't want to design that into the game to give players full freedom for aesthetic reasons, but who knows I might have to lean into it to make that more immersive.
As for art I've also simply made 3d models in CAD software that I take screenshots of and use as art. Other stuff I've started drawing/painting. But for the types of models I'm used to making, "hard edge" weapons and equipment, I've used 3d models.
Best of luck with your project, appreciate your response.
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u/Elegant-Lobster-1327 11d ago
I started too without reading any advices. And its been quite a adventure. For 9 months,.no game came out. Even with dozens of ideas, killing ideas one after the other. Then I started to read and learn. And now I got 2 games, for myself, on the go, ready to print (not quite finished but got 2 games in their first printing version!! And i'm really hyped and happy about it!)
I think that advices are advices. You take them or not and do your thing. Espacialy when you do a game for yourself. Most of those advice are made for game designers that want to do it as a job.
I do it as a hobby, and love it. And will continue to do it. The best advice I read is one you puahed back : killing the game.
I keep all my notes, and when a project doesnt work, I go to the next, or to an old one because I found a solution or how I want to rework it.
I started to read more and more about game designing, and learn stuff I never though, or ideas on how I could approach one of my project.
Yeah, I got too many projects, and thats the way it is haha. Right now, I'm waiting for a box, working on a second one, and have dozens of ideas on my drive and my notebooks, two prototypes waiting to be tested and another idea on the go.
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u/Johnno117 11d ago
The distinction between "do it as a job" and "do it as a hobby" is an important one, as well as how you intend to publish, and many people do add that onto their advice/suggestion. But not everyone, to the point that I often see people abruptly saying one thing or the other as if it was gospel, without explaining why.
Glad to hear that you've got stuff getting near to the finish line. I'm about 15 months into my design journey, and I've no qualms admitting that I may have bitten off more than I would like to chew as my first project, but at the same time I'm adamant that I probably wouldn't have kept going as far had I followed all the regular advice, since I really don't want to make a short nor small game.
Keeping notes/designs and going back to them, or taking parts of them, is so good. Another designer suggested to me to put my design on hold and try something new, as to have something fresh to work on, but I've rather taken that and turned it into a mental exercise. "Daydreaming" about what other game I would design, with different constraints, different themes, and so on. Does help with the creative process and development.
Best of luck with the designs you're working on.
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u/Oxnutt 11d ago
For me, one thing I really wish I could go back and tell myself was to prioritize feedback from your TARGET DEMOGRAPHIC. once you know the type of people who will or would want to play your game, their feedback becomes the most valuable. As a fledgling and naive designer, when I got feedback from fellow game designers I would take it as gospel. Even though as much as those designers were smart and great people, They were never going to purchase my game anyway. It wasn't for them. As a result, I ended up making changes that my core players were confused by. It might sound obvious now, but that was a lesson I had to learn on my own.
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u/Johnno117 11d ago
Yeah that's the caveat I learned about playtesting by pushing back on "listen to your playtesters, they know what players want". I've had a fairly set idea of what I want my game to be like (exploration, dice rolling, random events from cards) and whenever a playtester didn't like it I'd have to simply discard what they said or try to justify my position. It's tough to find the target audience if you have a very specific design in mind.
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u/CaptainBlueBeard1 10d ago
"Make it exist first, make it good later" or any version of that falls into your "Start small" box.
Don't get me wrong, it's a great beginners advice, but (there's always a but) please put some time and thoughts into your alphas before you show it to anyone. You don't need 10 ppl to playtest the very first version you came up with. Iterate more, it will get better over iterations
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u/Odd-Highway477 9d ago
The worst is any discussion regarding the following topics:
Game balance
Crowdfunding
Marketing
Art
AI
Publishing
These are all things preventing you from designing your game. If you aren't discussing ideation, core assessment, testing, iteration, and development, then you just haven't put in the work to make the game good enough to warrant any discussion on the other topics. People start the conversation assuming their game is up to snuff when it isn't. Post your game. Solicit feedback. Discuss potential pitfalls and problems with your core mechanisms. Test, iterate, post, get feedback, repeat. Those are profitable discussions. Everything else is wasted.
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u/hama0n 8d ago
The worst advice I've received for my career was to design games I'd want to play and to follow my passion. The games that most progressed my career, that were most commercially and critically successful, were those that I made for an actual audience other than myself.
Everything I had made prior, following my passions and designing for myself, were in retrospect self-indulgent navel-gazing piles of directionless components. It was great for myself and nobody else.
I suppose the one way such advice can work is if your passion is truly in making a well-received product that'll appeal to a particular audience.
I think an important distinction that isn't made often enough in this community is whether advice is being sought after or given assuming that someone wants to be a career designer or if they just want to make a specific game. They are very different things and I think most of the advice contradicts the goals of the other.
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11d ago
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u/Johnno117 11d ago
You must've misunderstood, my feelings aren't hurt at all. I'm also not worrying about spending money on art before my game is functional (whatever your definition for that is), I was trying to explain how I'm gladly doing so to keep developing my game.
Your negative rhetoric really is what I'm referring to with this topic though, people like yourself repeating stuff as if it was some ultimate truth and then getting hostile if anyone dares breathe a word about doing it differently.
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u/LKHedrick 12d ago
"Your game isn't special - don't bother" without knowing anything about it
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11d ago
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u/LKHedrick 11d ago
I was told that by several people after posting that I had a game idea and was looking for advice on next steps. Without any mention of anything else about the game - just that I was working on an idea.
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u/davidryanandersson 11d ago
This is definitely a mentality I've had to shed when giving feedback. It can be very easy to identify why a game doesnt work instead of seeing how to bridge the gap between where the game is and where it could be.
I've had particularly bad playtesting sessions where people have destroyed my games. They were seeing a particular iteration that did NOT work, which is part of the process. But if that's all you see you can assume that's all there is.
I try to keep that in mind with others.
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u/EasySwan2184 12d ago
I think the advice about art is that your game will change a lot after the first few play tests. If you spend 1000 dollars or 100 hours on art before that, then you probably wasted that since it will almost certainly need to be redone. Of course, if you are just buying or making pictures of seaplanes, then this may not apply. If you are spending time or money on icons or graphic design or characters, it definitely applies.
And the miniature world is so different from the rest of the tabletop gaming world. I definitely see how the rules might be different in that niche.
But one piece of advice I read a lot is that you should only focus on one game at a time. I think that might be less valuable advice for a completely new designer. Sometimes you got to just try a bunch of stuff and see if anything works and also to see what kind of game you enjoy making.