3 Overlooked Keys to Making Outstanding Games

Image: stopnlook

Making independent games is a fun but difficult business.  There is so much to think about: bringing together all the artwork, implementing the scripts and programming challenges, crafting a good story and gameplay design.  You have to focus on the player, the project, your team and yourself, a juggle all of these to make a finished product.

In my many years of independent game development and watching with other indie teams, most everyone remembers to come up with a kind of cool design.  Most everyone remembers the artwork, sound, and engineering too.  However, there are three main crucial points that I see young game developers completely miss over and over again.

But when followed correctly, these three tips dramatically increase the chances of the project being considered a success by everyone involved.  And being successful sounds pretty exciting, doesn’t it?

Crucial Key #1: Set Clear Goals for Your Game

When designing out your game project, it’s important to be clear about your goals.  This is absolutely crucial, because your goals will impact the project, whether you are aware of it or not.  Even if you don’t write out your goals, you still have them in your head.  Best to be certain and get them down on paper so that you know exactly where you’re going.

The three most popular goals for independent game projects are:

1. Make a game that’s really fun
2. Make a game that will look good on a resume (when applying to a game company)
3. Make a game that will be sell and make some money

There’s nothing wrong with any of these.  They have their advantages and disadvantages, and you can do two or three if you like (though that’s much more difficult).

As I said before, all that’s important is that you’re clear — then you won’t have the problem of taking on a different goal at the last minute and getting frustrated because it isn’t working.  I had this problem years ago with an indie game of mine called Jelly Wars.  While I was making the game, I was focused on goal #1 – Make a game that’s really fun.  But at the last minute I decided, “Hey, I can make money off this too, right…?”  So suddenly I tried to switch to a commercial product, and it was a miserable failure because there was a lot more that would have needed to be done (distribution platform, advertising, more fleshed out single-player campaign, etc).

It would have been better if I had just focused on goal #1 and counted it as a success, and then tried to make money off of my next project.  Granted, it is possible to make the transition from one goal to another, but it’s not going to be nearly as easy as if you had mapped it out from the start.

Crucial Key #2: Map Out What You Know and Don’t Know

When a team of talented indie game developers get together to design a game, they are often naive enough to think that once they design the whole game, then all they have to do is make it exactly as designed, and they’ll be done.

Wrong.

This isn’t a jab at the implementation or design talent of these people.  Rather, it’s a warning about the shifting sands of game design.  Just like in professional game development, indie game designs continue throughout the whole project.  You’ll learn things that you didn’t anticipate, you’ll see things that do or don’t work like you thought they would, or you might just flat out change your mind.

I learned this lesson the hard way with QuickQuests, a casual MMORPG I designed and produced years ago.  I wrote up over 50 pages of design documents and then talked with the programmer to begin implementation.  Once the system was done, I found that there were lots of design flaws in the basic gameplay that made it unplayable and incredibly boring.  By then it was too late to change anything and recovery was very difficult.

It would have been better if I had said to myself and my programmer, “This is what I’m thinking, but I can’t tell right now it it’s exactly going to work.  I could guess, but it probably wouldn’t be accurate.  Let’s get to that bridge and then we’ll cross it.”

So when you’re doing a design, don’t be afraid to put in some extra time to figure out features that you kind of gloss over right now.  It’s impossible to know everything in exquisite detail; if you think you do then you are a foolish designer.  You’ll thank yourself down the road when you have the extra time.

Crucial Key #3: Make a Simple Schedule

This is the big kahuna.  If I could tell you to pick one of these things and do it, it would be this one.  Making a schedule for the development of your game can increase the probability of your project being a success by tenfold.

Scheduling is one thing that lots of indie game developers neglect when they lay out the design of a game.  While they’re busy thinking about the story, the color of the main character’s cape, and which one of their friends could do the voice of the lovable sidekick, they forget that they need to know when all of this stuff is actually going to happen.  If you don’t write it out on paper, then you’re basically just going to be making it up as you go along.  This is dangerous, because it’s difficult enough for people to remember to do laundry or finish that report by Sunday.  It’s even harder to remember that the artist needs to know what assets to finish ASAP because the engineer is going to implement the system tomorrow and he’s going to hard code in the sprites.

Games have lots of dependencies and lots of tasks that need to be done, so making a quick schedule is vital.  It doesn’t have to be complex, and you can change it as you go along or add more time if you need to.  Just write down the large chunks of the game that need to be done (“Finish majority of art assets”, “Finish first playable level”, etc), and attach conservative dates to them.  Then you and your teammates will have something to work against and you’ll feel confident that you know exactly how the project is going.

Give Yourself the Highest Chance of Success!

The 3 items I’ve listed here are not difficult, but they certainly are the most overlooked aspects of making a successful independent title.  Take some time out at the beginning of your project, just an extra hour or two, and run through these 3 critical key points.  When your game is super fun, looks fantastic on your resume, or makes you a nice chunk of change, you won’t regret it.