Ideas Don’t Make Good Games, People Do
If you want a chance at making a successful game, take this advice.
People are everything. Meet people. Talk to people. Share with people. Collaborate with people. Good people. People who are smarter than you.
Work with people. It’s that simple. The concept seems basic and oversimplified, but it’s often ignored. Far too many independent developers are working alone or in tiny teams and go directly to development. It’s hurting them.
Get people for your team. Game jam with other people. Pitch to other people. Play test with people. Listen to people. Go hear people speak. Find advisors, mentors and teachers. Stay humble by keeping company with giants.
I know you’re super busy with development. I understand how hard it is to wedge social tasks in with your busy schedule. I feel the same way all the time and I’m an extrovert. However, if those tasks have a chance at increasing your success, no amount of isolated development will compensate for a failure to make other people central to your process.
For some of us, this is a hard truth. There is comfort in only having to answer to yourself. Maybe you don’t live in a big city with a vibrant community of game makers. Forums, blogs, and other online communities can be a comfort and make you feel as though they’re enough for collaboration and feedback. Sadly, they’re not.
Comfort is often an enemy of progress and success. If you inevitably have to make some wrong turns on the path to a succesful product, better to have mentors and play testers help you course correct early on. So many independent developers work hard on their games while blind to their ugly parts. They are too close to the process. Too married to mediocre ideas or execution. I see it all the time. Bringing other people in to our process helps snap us out of this daze.
Watch people play your game. Watch their faces. Look for the confusion. Notice the joy. Pay attention to the pacing of the experience. Are they spending too much time outside your key feedback loop or navigating poor UI? See how they process your experience. Don’t rely on written feedback. So many people struggle to find the right words or tell you what they think you want them to. Don’t fall victim to simple miscommunication due to an unwillingness to work with people.
Get mentorship. Seek idea validation. Prioritize play testing. Make people the center of all of these and don’t stop there. Work with people to understand what they love about your project. They will teach you how to promote your game. Don’t rest on assumptions. If you’re an indie game developer, you’ve come face to face with the pervasive marketing problem. However, if you’ve done your work to collaborate thus far you’ll have done a massive chunk of the work already.
In the end, there is one key truth that so many people ignore. It costs far less time, money and sanity to build a successful game if you make it a collaborative affair. It might feel like an extra step or time you don’t have to spare. Yet if you give me 2 teams—one who has gone straight to code and is pushing out an alpha for the first time in 9 months and another who has tested, consulted and prototyped with their core player base—I’ll bet on the latter every time.
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Collin is the CEO and Founder of PlayWell.
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