Prototype the Fun Before You Build the Game
I spent six months building a complex, interconnected crafting system for my current project, only to realize during the first playtest that I hadn’t built a feature—I’d built a chore. I had polished the UI, balanced the math, and written the lore, all to discover that the core loop was fundamentally boring. Most people will…
Scoping a Game You Can Actually Finish Alone
I spent three months building a procedural weather system for my last project because I thought “immersion” was the only thing that mattered. I was wrong. I wasn’t building a game; I was just writing a very expensive, very broken sentence about rain that no one would ever actually notice. Most tutorials on how to…
Your First Game Should Be Embarrassingly Small
Stop looking for the “ultimate engine tutorial” or a massive, hundred-page design document that you’ll never actually finish. Most people think learning how to start designing a game means mastering complex math or learning how to code a physics engine from scratch, but that’s just a way to procrastinate on the hard part. I spent…