This came up recently in a chat with my producer, and it was, if I had only one short piece of advice to give about game development, what would it be?
Now it was not stated that this advice should be to novices, and I’ve been working in games for a long time, but one answer just immediately came to me… and it’s pretty simple and crosses all skill boundaries.
“Don’t make a mobile game.”
Don’t lynch me yet Let me explain! We all want to be the next King or Rovio, but the reality is in terms of risk to reward chances mobile is the worst bet you could play. PC & Console just have it beat hands down… Yes, typically both development time and budget are slightly higher, but the odds of breaking even/having a big hit are just mountains higher.
There’s a lot of reasons for this, but the primary one is you have almost no control over promotion (unless your product has an average revenue high enough for scalable advertising, which is incredibly difficult).
This is my advice. There’s no shortage of examples of success on mobile, nor examples of failures, but all things equal going to mobile first is unnecessarily risky.
There is ONE exception to this: If you plan on failure. This is especially true of beginners, where financial success just isn’t the primary goal. When experience and getting published products is your goal, the lower cost and difficulty of publishing a mobile game is simply superior… not to mention since failure is expected on mobile nobody will bat an eye at the fact your first game didn’t sell enough to buy pizza with! You release on console with results like that and it’s a different story!
I’d love to hear what other developers have to say if they could offer one piece of quality advice and their reasoning for it. Toss in your level of experience (I’ve got 12 years) so we have an idea of where you’re coming from too!
@imaginaryhuman_1 Heh, I’ve played enough Oregon Trail to know not listening to advice gets you stranded in the Rockies dying of snake bites. Dang mountain snakes!
@KingMatthew & @JamesLeeNZ - Both solid pieces of advice (Start small being a very common one we toss around, but I hadn’t considered the importance of lighting… not really my thing… so excellent!)
Learn each aspect of your craft in its own right. That is, don’t learn “game development” and don’t “learn Unity”, learn programming or art or whatever your desired field is and then apply that to game development.
Logic in your game is more important than graphics, your game should be interesting to play, graphics don’t matter as long as your game is interesting !
This is something i’ve noticed. As for example, there are many games which are very interesting but they lack in graphics, best example i can think of is Minecraft.
Graphics aren’t very significant but unified aesthetics are. Looking at MineCraft, you should notice how the aesthetics immerse you in a blocky world and don’t let you go. They convince you that the world is real, even if only subconsciously.
Every successful game, whether it be TF2 or Flappy Birds, has unified aesthetics that work together to convince the player that the world he or she is embracing isn’t just a combination of pixels and numbers. For video games, this is extremely important because the minute the player sees the game trivially, the game becomes just a game and no more.
Painters discovered this fact long ago. Sure, detail is important to make your work stand out but if your work doesn’t consistently convey the same world, the viewer can’t take your work seriously with or without 4K resolution.
With video games, there are many other pieces to this puzzle of immersing players. Taking MineCraft as an example, every sound, graphic, and mechanic seems to all come from the same silly, blocky world. Interestingly, making the graphics or sounds of the game more realistic would actually make the game much worse.
Also, take up smoking. It is a great way to have a reason to step a way from the computer, and if you work in a large company, it is great chance to soundboard challenges you are having with other smokers.
(just kidding, don’t smoke, but if you do, try to make it productive)
I am going to kinda back this one. You can never win by following, and this industry is so young and erratic, that there are few “experts” in game design/marketing. Most people telling you how to do to it, have never really done it in the first place. And there is plenty of space to carve out your niche based on your methods and desires. If you want to build an MMO, fucking do it. You’ll either realize the difficulty, and start over with a better understanding, or realize games aren’t for you, or actually achieve it through force of will. (everyone should read the dev thread on Kinetic Damage).
Graphics should never be considered unimportant, even if your game is more focused on gameplay, your graphics should still be good even if they arent high fidelity
Slightly? Either your new to mobile development or new to PC development, because a PC game will typically take me a couple of months to get the graphics and basic mechanics down, in that time my mobile game is finished.
Disagree here. N64 games had stunning graphics when they were released, and since have become very dated-looking. (Notice that nobody’s* making N64-style retro indie games, while 8-bit and 16-bit styles are very popular)
But they’re fun, and the brilliant design makes it easy to look past the dated graphics, and I think that’s the point you’re trying to make anyways!
*the world’s a big place, so probably somebody, but it’s a small number
It’s true. Ignore their advice it’s all useless. Just steal every last one of their ideas. Stealin’ ideas, that the absolutely most important part of being a good game design / dev.
Let me explain! We all want to be the next King or Rovio, but the reality is in terms of risk to reward chances mobile is the worst bet you could play. PC & Console just have it beat hands down… Yes, typically both development time and budget are slightly higher, but the odds of breaking even/having a big hit are just mountains higher.