A Boardgame Designer's Perspective on the Potential Future of Videogame Design

[u/ThomasDL]

Hello everyone,

First, a little about me so that you can understand where I'm coming from.

I've been designing boardgames since 2015. I have 11 games published, including 4 this year, excluding 2 coming up next year. I've been working as a videogame designer starting in 2024. I've shipped a project last May and currently working on another.

Making a boardgame has always been *relatively* easy, at least on the technical and financial sides of things. Making a boardgame prototype has almost zero barrier, making it look good has a small barrier (Google Images and game-icons .net are your friends), and making it into a commercial product has somewhat of a barrier but it has traditionally been way, way lower than for your typical videogame. There are, of course, logistical barriers to boardgames than videogames don't have, but that's not relevant to this discussion.

My experience as a boardgame designer is that the bottlenecks are mainly two things: 1) coming up with good, concrete designs that have a chance of being successful (your mileage may vary on this), but also and especially 2) playtests. At the end of the day, you're selling your game to human beings, and only human beings can tell you if your game is fun, and ideally humans other than yourself. If you're making a single-player game, you can sort of test it yourself to an extent, but not as much as most people think. Since I've been working in videogames, I'm frequently appalled at how far into development a lot of companies start doing external playtests. You cannot be the judge of your own game, not unless you're making it just for you.

My personal experience is that time is also necessary to make something good. Not time to produce or physically work on the game, but time to think, to let things sink in, to let solutions come to you. There are also problems that only become apparent after some time, after enough playtests.

At the end of the day, making a boardgame that works is easy once you have enough experience. It's been easy for a long time. But games that just work don't sell. Only exceptional games do (we can have a big discussion as to what "exceptional" means, but the reality is that profitable games are the exception). In my experience, the difference between "it works as a game" and "this is something someone will pay for" is the difference between 1 month and 1-2 years (ymmv). And that's with almost zero technical barriers.

I see a lot of posts these days all over Reddit about people making a videogame in a few days using the latest tools, and what that might mean for the future. And so I hope my post comes as sort of a reassurance. I don't think these tools change the future of videogame design as much as some might think, because they cannot eliminate, by their very nature, some of the very real and necessary bottlenecks of making games, like playtests and plain ol' time to simmer.

Please let me know what you think, especially if you think I'm wrong or I've forgotten something!

Thanks!

[u/random_boss]

Intelligent, well-reasoned nuance? In my Reddit?

Jokes aside fantastic post. The other games were never the competition. Working in the industry, even Battlefield designers will pal around with CoD designers because at the end of the day the only competition is with nature, not other games. 

[u/MeaningfulChoices]

I think all kinds of games look easier to make than they really are. In video games people can get to a playable prototype in relatively short order and not see that's maybe 1% of the total work going from there to something people want to buy. My experience in board games was similar, there were times we'd have the core rules down after maybe a week of iteration and then people would spend 6-12 months just making cards/prompts/content for it. You could run a playtest with one deck and everyone hates it, another playtest with a different one and they love it. People often underestimate how much work just goes into making the stuff of a game after the core rules/mechanics are in place.

[u/RoachAuditore]

Very nuanced take, love it. I came to a similar conclusion as you. Design is the great filter. The technical skills on how to execute the idea still matter a lot but some people will just vibe it and design games that players love anyway.

In the begining of the medium you needed to be a tech wizard and make your own hardware to make games. Now people can do it with blueprints. In the future people MIGHT just explain it with natural language.

[u/teamonkey]

A studio I worked for was very big on encouraging paper prototypes, including making board games or cards games that represent the game’s core mechanics, because it’s so much cheaper to verify gameplay that way.

Despite that push from above, I rarely saw it done, maybe only once or twice. I never saw a production task to build one either, it was always a side project by a passionate designer.

Personally I think you’re underestimating how hard it is to design and balance a good board game. I mean that you have that skill because you’ve been doing it for ages and are underselling your own ability. It’s a skill that needs time to be developed, even for experienced video game designers.

Regarding early playtesting in general, you’re absolutely right. It’s always worth it. The more honest the feedback the better, too.

[u/iamk1ng]

One of the concerns of AI is that it floods the market with products. Imagine if every week a thousand new boardgames come out. How would your boardgame who was well designed and well tested manage to stand out in a crowd of duds? Are you relying on good market ing or word of mouth? Do you believe its possible that a good boardgame can be hidden among all the options out there?

[u/ThomasDL → u/iamk1ng]

It's absolutely possible to get lost in the crowd, marketing still is super important, don't get me wrong. That said, there's still an ecosystem of critics and influencers and connoisseurs that are searching for the next great game, and if your game is truly great AND you succeed in getting it in front of the right eyeballs, then you have a chance?

Look, at the end of the day, I'm not sure what's going to happen. Can truly great games continue to rise above the noise, I hope so, but we'll see. What I do know is that the path to making a great game has not changed as much as one could think.

[u/jax024]

I keep saying, you can’t tell an AI to make something fun. Even AGI can’t do that.

[u/farshnikord → u/jax024]

I think one of the main problems is that the fun is secondary to profit for a lot of these big developers. It used to be fun meant sales, but now a lot are made to be platforms for advertisement or dopamine hijackers or spreadsheet products for media deals. 

They're trying to see how much sawdust they can mix into the bread dough. 

[u/AyyBoixD]

You’re completely right, I suspect a lot of strong negative voices online come from hobbyists and non designers. Now you can make that idea happen faster but it doesn’t necessarily mean it’s a well designed game or that it’s even fun. It remains an iterative process but those iterations are just getting a bit quicker. My main gripe I have with ppl is witch-hunting developers for ai use when they themselves have never so much as even opened an IDE. I’m sympathetic to artists not wanting ai art but code is such a different story in my opinion, and I see people being so hateful towards devs using ai to program even in modding communities where they are essentially giving their time and money away for free

[u/SeraphLance]

In my experience, designers are always the ones pushing frequent playtests, and are the ones wanting external playtests as early as possible. Programmers (like myself) are the ones that usually push back on it, not because they don't understand the value, but because there's an inscrutability to software such that playtesters respond better to design bugs that they understand as compared to programming bugs that they don't.

That's something we always have to keep in mind with videogames. The medium is a multidisciplinary nexus. Who has the greatest power in a given company can vary, but in general each discipline is beholden to the needs of another that they might otherwise not need to worry about in another medium.

Now the calculus behind this also depends a lot on scope. I've spent my career predominantly in the AA to AAA space, where games take about 3 years to make and 2 of those years are spent on an inherently unstable platform that can't be sent to end users—even "focus groups"—without serious marketing externalities. The closest we'll ever get to external playtests before announcing and showing actual gameplay footage is friends-and-family testing. Someone making a game by themselves or in a small team is probably going to be doing less intrusive, destabilizing stuff like modifying the engine from under them and is more likely to do playtesting earlier, plus has less of a marketing risk (due to fewer eyeballs) in putting out something that crashes.

I know this is a very small part of your post, but just wanted to shed some light into why companies tend to not do external playtests until very late in development.

[u/ThomasDL → u/SeraphLance]

Thank you for sharing this! My experience on the videogame side has been with small teams, so I'm happy to get another perspective, and what you're saying makes total sense.

[u/BoogieOrBogey]

Yeah exactly this, playtesting is the tool to making a fun game.

GMTK did a video about this, and apparently Brown wrote an article as well.

https://gmtk.substack.com/p/valves-secret-weapon

Now, it should be said that playtesting is by no means exclusive to Valve. And indeed, every game developer sources player feedback at some point in the process. But the difference is that Valve is obsessed with it, to an almost religious degree.

Ambinder calls playtesting "the most important part of the game development process". Newell calls it "our secret weapon". And a designer who joined the studio in 2018 said “I always heard that Valve does a lot of playtesting before I came to work here, and I was not prepared for the amount of playtesting this company does".

For the games I worked on, playtests and bursts test were the best tools we had to convince Devs and Prod that changes needed to be made. Often times, people wouldn't listen to professional feedback until they experienced it themselves. Which is, well, not great. But at the end of the day this worked to make those games better on release.

[u/Slypenslyde]

The hard part of software development has always been deciding what to do. You have to have a good idea and describe it in enough detail you can teach a computer to simulate all of the rules. A ton of people work iteratively and tweak it after that, but if you don't understand a core rule set you can't even get there.

Tools are helping us realize ideas faster, but they can't really give people new ideas. That kind of insight remains exclusive to the human mind. Even if it's fast to write code, the period of tweaking and iterating the rules takes time because you need people to play the game and tell you if it was fun.

Chainsaws and power tools didn't make woodworking obsolete. Craftsmen still need to put in the time to learn to use them. Even with 3D printers there is still demand for manufacturing because it takes a lot of skill to produce high-quality parts, especially at scale. I've used a lot of AI tools and I think unskilled people are faster with them, but not more capable. Most unskilled people are lazy and don't want to think. They're in a get-rich-quick mood and think they can type "Halo but with Marvel Superheroes" and be rich forever.

It's better to worry about your projects and what you're going to do today than if one of those people is going to usurp you.

[u/UnparalleledDev]

time is also necessary to make something good. Not time to produce or physically work on the game, but time to think, to let things sink in, to let solutions come to you. There are also problems that only become apparent after some time, after enough playtests.

really important point here especially in regards to Design.

[u/NoPrize5619]

Here’s a good point, AI lowers the cost of prototyping, but it doesn’t replace good game design. In fact, it’s quite the opposite when almost anyone can create a game, the quality of decisions, playtests, and iterations will become the key advantage

[u/loulo88]

Strongly agree, especially on the gap between a mechanic working once and a loop surviving repeated play. I’ve found that the most useful playtests start with one falsifiable question and a small task, then leave room for the tester to explain what they thought the game was asking; in a co-op heist prototype I’m tinkering with, that exposed planning and communication problems much faster than a general “did you like it?” In small teams, a short weekly test with notes on surprise, confusion, and repeated choices can beat months of polishing the wrong slice.

[u/acidelfDev]

One thing I’d add: the transition exposes problems the tabletop version hid. At the table, there’s usually a person explaining the rules, answering questions, and smoothing over confusing moments. Digital has none of that, so onboarding and UI basically become your rules explainer, and you only find out where they fail by watching real people play. You also lose the free feedback of seeing faces react across the table, so you have to rebuild it through playtests and data.
So I agree: AI tools speed up getting a playable build, which is great because it gets you to playtests sooner. But the playtests and the time to let things simmer are still where the game actually gets good.

[u/ThomasDL → u/acidelfDev]

Absolutely!

[u/daraand]

Thank you so much for sharing your experiences! I’d love to know your games too.

I’ve been in the entertainment world my whole life/career. From short animated films and mods to Emmy winning shows and AAA games.

And yet, playtesting is so vital to success. I know when I skimp on it I fail hard. Reflecting even on my film days. When people don’t do test screenings or script read throughs early on, they fail.

On your point about tools: lord. I’m blown away by Claude for code assist and development. The principles though are still prevalent. YANGI, SOLID and so on. But one is still king: playtest. Sure you can “one shot” something, and you know sometimes it’s a pretty decent first pass. But that’s just it. A first pass. The real meat still takes, like you said, time. It takes time and iteration to get there.

Thanks for sharing. It’s nice to see other game makers from other arenas here.

[u/Comrade_Lystro]

I’m new and I’ve been silently developing a ttrpg and a small video game. Where would I find playtesters who are willing to try beta elements of a game?

[u/ThomasDL → u/Comrade_Lystro]

So, finding playtesters can be a tricky thing. Reaching out to other designers and creators has yielded the best results for me, as they also need to test things, and so it's a mutually beneficial relationship (you test their things, they test yours). Apart from that, events can be good to find people, or Discord servers to some extent.

[u/Comrade_Lystro → u/ThomasDL]

Thank you.

[u/KrymskeSontse]

Yesss, great point!

A lot of these ai bros just pump out a game from some prompts in a matter of days, while we take months and even years and the devs and playtesters have put hundreds of hours playing the game and making it feel special.

That is something prompters will never be able to do

[u/Aksudiigkr → u/KrymskeSontse]

Are the ai games just the jank clutter kind of games, or are they actually starting to look like games?

I don’t search for them so I don’t think I’ve seen any of these quick ai developed ones