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> Also, even the general approach for game development--presumably there's some white boarding phase followed by a wireframe phase etc like you have with app de

> Also, even the general approach for game development--presumably there's some white boarding phase followed by a wireframe phase etc like you have with app dev? What does that look like in game dev land, what are some reasonable tools for hobbyists for each stage, etc? If you're interested in learning more about this, I can't recommend enough The Art of Game Design: A Book of Lenses. The gist is that it's hard to make an actually fun game by working "from first principles", you need to iterate tens if not hundreds of times just to get a solid game idea down (more subtle aspects like balance may require thousands of iterations). So a lot of the work of a game designer is coming up with ways to iterate extremely fast, e.g. by making a prototype of the game using paper figurines and writing the rules in a google doc.

jkarneges 6y ago
> it's hard to make an actually fun game A zillion years ago I used to do hobby games as a solo dev, and it took me a long time to understand this. I was always interested in game engine elements (sprites, tilemaps, input, menus, audio, pathfinding, etc), and I could put those elements together to make halfway decent games (usually by copying existing genres). But assembling those elements is a skill of its own, and this is easy to overlook if you're a programmer who thinks programming is the only challenge to making a game (or making anything :)). I didn't truly appreciate game design as a skill until I worked with a separate game designer on a project. He made decisions on things that would have never crossed my mind. From that point on, I started seeing game design everywhere. Notably, I started seeing it in older games, ones I had played many times and that inspired me to get into game dev in the first place. I hadn't realized how well thought out the classics were.

jkarneges 6y ago

> it's hard to make an actually fun game A zillion years ago I used to do hobby games as a solo dev, and it took me a long time to understand this. I was always interested in game engine elements (sprites, tilemaps, input, menus, audio, pathfinding, etc), and I could put those elements together to make halfway decent games (usually by copying existing genres). But assembling those elements is a skill of its own, and this is easy to overlook if you're a programmer who thinks programming is the only challenge to making a game (or making anything :)). I didn't truly appreciate game design as a skill until I worked with a separate game designer on a project. He made decisions on things that would have never crossed my mind. From that point on, I started seeing game design everywhere. Notably, I started seeing it in older games, ones I had played many times and that inspired me to get into game dev in the first place. I hadn't realized how well thought out the classics were.