Stop looking for ready-made advice

I usually get two kinds of question. The first kind I can answer clearly, technical questions like “what should the tag order be,” “when should I open the page,” “what should I set the discount to.” For the second kind my honest answer is usually that I do not know, “should I put multiplayer in,” “should this feature stay,” “is my game fun enough.” The difference comes less from how hard the questions are and more from games not being measurable and from nobody having the full context.

For most new developers the picture is this. They have been watching gamedev videos for two years, they sit in three Discords at once, they have saved over a hundred threads, and they still cannot decide on the second mechanic of their first game, or they have not finished a single game end to end. The question they ask always comes out in the same place, “which one do you think is more correct.” They are still failing at turning a game into a product, so naturally their questions come from there. In that state it is very hard to give them advice about their game that they can act on.

Skills in this industry split in two. On the hard skill side there is writing code, animation, producing assets. There is a measurable output and you can learn it by someone showing you directly. On the soft skill side there is judgement, decision making, empathy and analysis. You do not learn those by someone telling you what to do. Those are the main ingredients of designing and marketing a game.

Design and judgement calls are also decisions that settle and mature over time, inside a context. If one woman gives birth in 9 months, 9 women do not give birth in 1 month, they give birth to 9 different children, still in 9 months.

That is where the trouble starts. While you are learning the technical side, do-this-like-this videos genuinely work, there is a right answer there and it can be shown. Once that habit sets in, you look for an answer of the same clarity where a design decision has to be made. But there is no rule in design that you memorise and apply. If there were, everyone who knew the rules would make games that land.

What people expect is exactly this, “tell me the hard rules and I will apply them.” Nobody can give you that. The decision itself is your job, and the judgement you use to make it is not something that can be handed over.

The most dangerous part of watching advice is how much it looks like work. What programmers call tutorial hell is exactly this, and the design version of it is worse. You do not even end up with a single line of code piled up behind you. Every video you watch and every thread you read gives you the feeling that you learned something, and that feeling is real. Meanwhile nothing changes in the game in front of you. You spend three months researching the right method without making a single design decision, and those three months feel to you like work.

In Turkey especially, this has turned into an economy. A guy who has never shipped a game sells a course, speaks on a panel, sits on a jury. What he sells is not his own decision, it is the story of a decision that worked for someone else on a different game. Buying that story does not give you the judgement that produced the decision, you just end up holding somebody else’s answer, and then you sell that answer to other people.

They do say one disaster teaches you more than a thousand pieces of advice, but the bill for that disaster can be very expensive in the games industry. I suffer from this too. I have always been someone who enjoys building an end to end system and optimising it, I applied the same method in my mobile years and I learned by taking some very clean slaps. The biggest one, which I repeated over and over, was taking myself out of the dev cycle. Because whatever else is true, a game is the work of one person making the critical decisions or of a collective vision. Take the vision it started with out and they turn into a completely different product, or a completely different game. In mobile I lived through that by choosing fast growth over protecting that vision. If someone had come and told me this at the time I would probably have chosen fast growth again, because the state of the industry back then pointed that way. But the cyclical problems that growth brings had to be learned by living through them, and there were not many people who had.

There is also this. If you are making your own game you are the lead on that project, even if your team is one person. Constantly looking outside for the right answer is running from that role. You are not running from making a wrong decision, you are running from owning the decision.

So what do you do? There is only one thing you can put in the place of consuming advice, and that is collecting reasons rather than answers. Everything from here on is that same thing applied in different places.

Take notes while you play, but write down why you think it works, not what it is. Find a moment you liked and answer the question of what you would lose if that moment were not there. While you answer it, do not forget which company made that game, how, and under what conditions. If you take it blind without that context, the decision can sit awkwardly in your game and you can end up paying the price that company paid when it made the call. What you are really trying to work out is which decision was made for what.

Look outside your own genre too. If you only follow games in your own genre you mistake that genre’s habits for design rules, and that is exactly why you end up doing what everyone else does.

When you make a decision, write the decision down and write next to it what you expect to happen, then look at the result. Judgement is what forms when those two lines stack on each other, it does not form any other way.

If you are going to ask someone, ask for the reasoning, not the result. The answer to “what would you do” teaches you nothing, the answer to “why did you do it this way” teaches you something. The first one gives you a decision, the second gives you a method and the mechanism behind it.

The same applies to this series. Take how Steam works, the tag mechanism and the discount calendar from here, those have right answers. But do not take what to put in your game from here, what you can take is more about what not to put in.

Nobody can decide in your place. The answers you collect do not make the decision clearer, they only help you postpone it.