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Why Should I Make Games?
Why should you make games? Do it to give players joy from your unique perspective and to have fun expressing yourself. You win and the players win.
Duane Alan Hahn
I had no special training at all; I am completely self taught. I don't fit the mold of a visual arts designer or a graphic designer. I just had a strong concept about what a game designer is. Someone who designs projects to make people happy. That's a game designer's purpose.
Toru Iwatani
From the book Programmers at Work by Susan Lammers
Even though I enjoyed the challenge of programming, ultimately the motivation was the fans, the gamers themselves. I kept asking myself, "Is that guy enjoying the game?" In those early days we got fan mail all the time.
Bob Whitehead (adapted)
You have to measure your success by the way your audience responds to your games. No matter how small that audience is, it's yours. Your game is part of the lives and the memories of those people in a way that WordPerfect or Lotus 1-2-3 or Windows can never be.
Orson Scott Card
Compute Magazine, October 1992
'The player is paramount' is a phrase all game developers should remember. Great game designers have a certain amount of love or respect for their players. If you're not helping your players feel happy and fulfilled in some way then you shouldn't be making games at all. Don't make games just to express yourself. Don't make games just to impress other game designers. Think about the players too. Make games that are fun, games that satisfy, games that make your players feel like you care.
Duane Alan Hahn
To me games have an extremely great and still unrealized potential to influence man. I want to bring joy and excitement to people's lives in my games, while at the same time communicate aspects of this journey of life we are all going through. Games have a larger potential for this than linear movies or any other form of media.
Philip Price from a Halcyon Days interview
Game development makes a great hobby. I also think in the future, with engines, tools, and books on game development becoming commonplace, that more artists, writers, and just plain creative people will start to produce more games for people to play simply because they enjoy doing it. For a growing number of people, constructing cool software is like building a neat model airplane; it's just a craft that takes a lot of skill but provides even more enjoyment in return.
Ben Sawyer (adapted)
From The Ultimate Game Developer's Sourcebook
Getting Started (You Can Do It)
Woody Allen said "Eighty percent of success is showing up." That seems to apply to just about everything, including programming. Even if you barely know what you're doing, there is some kind of magic in 'showing up'. All you have to do is work on your program. That simple action can have an almost supernatural effect. Your subconscious mind will bubble like boiling water and amazing things will happen.
Duane Alan Hahn
I wrote my first game on a remote terminal using APL/360 as the language. My first microcomputer game emulated a complete tank war game on a home-brew system I built that had a whopping 4K of memory and a 512-byte operating system. The point is, a good writer need not blame his tools. He'll make do!
Scott Adams
K-Power Magazine, June 1984
You can't hit a home run unless you step up to the plate.
Unknown
Imperfection clings to a person, and if they wait till they are brushed off entirely, they would spin for ever on their axis, advancing nowhere.
Thomas Carlyle
To avoid criticism, do nothing, say nothing, be nothing.
Elbert Hubbard
Criticism is information that will help you grow.
Hendrie Weisinger, Ph.D
The greatest mistake you can make in life is to be continually fearing you will make one.
Elbert Hubbard
Concern over criticism clogs creativity.
Duane Alan Hahn
While one person hesitates because he feels inferior, the other is busy making mistakes and becoming superior.
Henry C. Link
The dread of criticism is the death of genius.
William Gilmore Simms
I have been impressed with the urgency of doing. Knowing is not enough; we must apply. Being willing is not enough; we must do.
Leonardo da Vinci
You can't build a reputation on what you are going to do.
Henry Ford
Even if you are on the right track, you'll get run over if you just sit there.
Will Rogers
It is the greatest of all mistakes to do nothing because you can do only a little. Do what you can.
Sydney Smith
No man ever sank under the burden of the day. It is when tomorrow's burden is added to the burden of today, that the weight is more than a man can bear.
George Macdonald
Success seems to be connected with action. Successful people keep moving. They make mistakes, but they don't quit.
Conrad Hilton
Every great work, every great accomplishment, has been brought into manifestation through holding to the vision, and often just before the big achievement, comes apparent failure and discouragement.
Florence Scovel Shinn
The essential part of creativity is not being afraid to fail.
Edwin H. Land
Use those talents you have. You will make it. You will give joy to the world. Take this tip from nature: The woods would be a very silent place if no birds sang except those who sang best.
Bernard Meltzer
Sometimes you just have to have the confidence and the belief in the fact that you're going to pull it off and you just keep going forward every day and you don't allow the self-doubt or any doubt or even a shadow of a doubt to enter your mind because you just have to keep going forward.
Barrie M. Osborne (adapted)
The End of All Things documentary on The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King (Extended Edition) DVD
There is a difference between conceit and confidence. Conceit is bragging about yourself. Confidence means you believe you can get the job done.
Johnny Unitas
Ideas are cheap. A dime a dozen, as they say. It's the implementation that's important! The trick isn't just to have a computer game idea, but to actually create it!
Scott Adams
K-Power Magazine, June 1984
The concept for PITFALL took less than 10 minutes. The difficult part was sitting at the computer, for over 1,000 hours, and making it happen.
David Crane from a Digital Press quote page
First you write down your goal; your second job is to break down your goal into a series of steps, beginning with steps which are absurdly easy.
Fitzhugh Dodson
Many drops make a bucket, many buckets make a pond, many ponds make a lake, and many lakes make an ocean.
Percy Ross
You can get all the advice you want and read all the books you want, but what you've got to do is stand at the computer like I did from day one and say, "What can this stupid little thing do?" You've got to try little things out and make a million mistakes. But the great part about a home computer is you can do whatever you want and you aren't going to blow anything up.
Gary Kitchen from an AGH Library article
Learn how to program and play lots of games. If you find yourself capable of writing a game, someday you'll be capable of writing a really good game. My dad's a writer, and when you ask him how to learn to write, he says, "write." So basically, do it and keep doing it until you get good.
Fred Haslam
From SimCity 2000: Power, Politics and Planning by Nick Dargahi and Michael Bremer
The best way to move game design forward is simply to develop, design, and construct a game. And make sure you finish it. No matter how bad, how simple, how slow your finished product is, you will learn an immense amount simply by building a game on your own.
Read, experiment, design, develop, play, and most important of all, have fun. In the end, having fun is what games are all about.
Ben Sawyer (adapted)
From The Ultimate Game Developer's Sourcebook
There are cases where you design something that looks good on paper and there's only one small part of it that's fun. You have to focus on that and throw the rest away.
Brent Iverson
Very few programmers are able to create a big hit on their first or second attempt. It takes time to build the skills required. So start simple (at the bottom), write a game you are capable of doing, and work your way up to the top. After you create one game, take a short break, then make your next game. Each time you'll know a little more than you did before.
Ben Sawyer (adapted)
From The Ultimate Game Developer's Sourcebook
Many people believe that humility is the opposite of pride, when, in fact, it is a point of equilibrium. The opposite of pride is actually a lack of self-esteem. A humble person is totally different from a person who cannot recognize and appreciate himself as part of this world's marvels.
Rabino Nilton Bonder
When you're young, you tend to believe what people tell you, and that's dangerous. As you get older, you learn that you're never as good or as bad as they say you are. If you understand this, you win.
George Clooney (adapted)
My dad delighted in me, which is an interesting realization. Anything that I would do throughout the week was kind of like when you're at a casino and you get casino chips but it's not real money until you go to the cashier's window. On Sunday, when I'd go home and do laundry, I would tell him about my week. Just to watch him delight turned those chips, if you will, into hard cash. When that was taken away from me, you realize that you have to do things for your own gratification and not for parental acceptance
or whatever. You just need and want to do it for yourself.
Mike Myers from Inside the Actors Studio (adapted)
Even though it's fun to crawl inside a computer and play with its potential, it's really important to look at other aspects of your life as well. That's where ideas for programs will come from.
Marcia Burrows
K-Power Magazine, April 1984
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How to Make New Games from Old Games
One way to invent your own game is to take an old game that doesn't quite work for your purposes and change it around. You might make some minor revisions in the game or you might totally overhaul the whole thing so that it's completely unrecognizable, depending on how much of the original game is attractive to you.
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Identify your goals.
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Brainstorm a list of all the games you can think of that relate to your goals.
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Put a plus sign next to the games you feel positively about, and a minus sign next to the ones that have negative connotations for you.
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Choose one of the games that has a plus sign next to it, a game that you like, but one that's not perfect for reaching your goal or goals.
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What is it that you like about the game?
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What is the part of the game you'd like to change? Describe that element here.
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Brainstorm a number of ways to replace that element with something else.
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Choose one of your new elements and describe what you like about it and the way that it might fit into the old game.
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Does the game still work? Is it still fun to play your new way? Are there any more changes that will be necessary because of the element that you've just changed?
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Is there anything else from your brainstorm in part 7 that you can incorporate in your new version?
Have you completely recycled this old game so that it meets your standards? Are you excited about your new version? If you are, then why are you still reading this? Get going.
Adapted from the book Playfair by Matt Weinstein and Joel Goodman
Where we cannot invent, we may at least improve.
Charles Caleb Colton
Begin with another's to end with your own.
Baltasar Gracian
Nothing is new except arrangement.
William J. Durant
What is originality? Undetected plagiarism.
Dean William R. Inge
Writing Down Your Game Ideas
While tight with concentration on what is being written, the writer has a thought, an insight, a partially articulate concept. The natural response is to think, "I can't stop what I am writing. I'll remember the idea," and continue writing. The writer is wrong. He will not remember it. The thought, the insight, the concept will disappear. It may return, but you will not need it then, or recall when it might have been appropriate.
Insights and perceptions pass through the mind like fleet fireflies. Lit for an instant, then gone back into the dark. They are precious, irreplaceable. Stop what you are writing and write them into a notebook, onto a napkin, a scrap of paper. ANYWHERE. They are more important than what you are writing now. What you are writing now is there. It is visible, tangible. You will not lose the mood, the flow, the roll.
From the book Dare to be a Great Writer: 329 Keys to Powerful Fiction by Leonard Bishop
Write it, even if you think it's terrible. Don't prevent yourself from jotting down a word, phrase, or paragraph just because it "isn't quite right" or "it won't work." Maybe it will, maybe it won't, but it's better to write it down, you can always edit later. And you don't want to stop yourself before you even get started! The point isn't to use everything you write. You can't be expected to pop out perfect prose your first time out! Write now, edit later.
Cristine Grace (adapted)
If you fall in love with an idea, you won't see the merits of alternative approaches—and will probably miss an opportunity or two. One of life's great pleasures is letting go of a previously cherished idea. Then you're free to look for new ones. What part of your idea are you in love with? What would happen if you kissed it goodbye?
Roger von Oech
Discoveries are often made by not following instructions, by going off the main road, by trying the untried.
Frank Tyger
People should think things out fresh and not just accept conventional terms and the conventional way of doing things.
R. Buckminster Fuller
Creativity, as has been said, consists largely of rearranging what we know in order to find out what we do not know. Hence, to think creatively, we must be able to look afresh at what we normally take for granted.
George Kneller
Creativity requires the courage to let go of certainties.
Erich Fromm
Creativity is inventing, experimenting, growing, taking risks, breaking rules, making mistakes, and having fun.
Mary Lou Cook
He who never walks except where he sees other men's tracks will make no discoveries.
Unknown
They will say you are on the wrong road, if it is your own.
Antonio Porchia
Things to Think About
A good game has to have a fun core, which is a one-sentence description of why it's fun.
Paul Reiche III
Compute Magazine, January 1992
Keep the rules of the game simple. Ideally, first-time players should understand and enjoy the game without instructions.
Mark Cerney
Next Generation Magazine, January 1997
Anyone can make the simple complicated. Creativity is making the complicated simple.
Charles Mingus
The really blisteringly original games are incredibly simple.
Paul Reiche III
Compute Magazine, January 1992
People want to go back to a simpler time where you walked up, read two lines of instructions, and knew the game. People want clean, simple challenges, and are tired of the 45-move joystick/button combinations it takes to do a roundhouse kick.
Curt Vendel from Weekly Wire
Pinball is a good example of what makes a great game—a mixture of luck and skill. That's a very critical aspect. In the long run a more-skilled player will do better, but in the short run anyone should be able to win. There should be some randomness, which offer challenges over the game. When you get to games like Pac-Man or Mortal Kombat where there's a documentable sequence that you can execute to succeed, to me that's totally antithetical to what a game should be.
Howard Scott Warshaw from a Digital Press interview
One of my best tricks is to make every damn possible thing random. If something repeats (for example if your character looks left and right) don't make it ping-pong in perfect timing like a metronome. Always slip in randomness so that something that does repeat never looks the same twice. Nothing in your game should move to a "beat."
Dave Perry
Next Generation Magazine, January 1997
I used the random object placement in level 3 for variety. I didn't want it to be like a puzzle, where once you've solved it, it's not very interesting to do it again, and I wanted to avoid that. The bat was also added as a confusion factor, to move objects around a bit, so that the game wasn't too predictable. (I did make a mistake in my random object placement code, and there is a 1 in 18 chance that the yellow key will start out in the yellow castle, making the game unwinnable. This only happens in level 3.)
As you may gather from the above, I think that randomness in a game is very strong medicine, and must be very carefully controlled.
Warren Robinett from a Good Deal Games interview
Don't ever take control away from the joypad/keyboard unless you really want to piss off the player. When you press jump, make him jump. Fight animators or anyone else who tries to get you to do anything else. Instant response is key.
Dave Perry (Adapted)
Next Generation Magazine, January 1997
It is said that our leisure activities no longer give us a break from the alienating qualities of the work we do; instead, they have come to resemble that work.
The chief reason our recreation is like our work is that it has become more competitive. Sports, for example, have always been competitive and never really qualified as play in the first place. Although it's not generally acknowledged, most definitions of play do seem to exclude competitive activities.
In an experiment with five-and six-year olds, Janice Nelson and her associates found that "success as well as failure in competition produced consistent increases in aggression, as compared with the effects of noncompetitive play," although failure made the children more aggressive. Another study discovered that boys who won a subsequent competition were more aggressive than those who failed. Even winning is not enough to eradicate the frustrating elements of competition. The hostile act of competition, on the playing field and in other contexts, for both participants and spectators, leads us to become more aggressive.
Any activity whose goal is victory cannot be play, if you are trying to win, you are not engaged in true play.
Adapted from No Contest: The Case Against Competition by Alfie Kohn
Play is supposed to be the opposite of work, but most video games are just jobs with a little bit of fun thrown in. These games can leave players feeling abused, frustrated, and overly aggressive. What your players need is freedom from competition and aggravation. Give your players a place to play where they don't have to win anything. Let them have fun without having to follow a bunch of rules. Give your players a chance to overcome challenges that have many solutions. Your game can either irritate or alleviate.
Which would you rather do? If you want to add to the happiness of your players, give them freedom.
Duane Alan Hahn
Finishing Your Projects
Art is never finished, only abandoned.
Leonardo da Vinci
The last 10% of game design is really what separates the good games from the great games. It's what I call the
clean-up phase of game design. Here's where you make sure all the elements look great. The game should look good, feel good, sound good, play good.
Gary Kitchen
Gary Kitchen's GameMaker Manual
Even if your first game doesn't turn out the way you'd like, it can give you ideas for other games.
Christopher Chance
K-Power Magazine, April 1984
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