Ask HN: Recommend resources that helped your game dev journey?

You need to make multiple games and think about what did and didn't work. Very few developers it was their first game. The early PC developers were pumping out multiple games a year.

While it won't help with real time games, Building Blocks of Tabletop Game Design: An Encyclopedia of Mechanism, will get you thinking about game mechanics.

If you want to make social games, then read The Lessons of Lucasfilm's Habitat http://www.fudco.com/chip/lessons.html There's also 21 years of blog posts worth reading here http://habitatchronicles.com/category/general/

Also don't signup-gate web games, players need to be able to play them instantly, without an account.

I don't think books and tutorials help that much. Playing and making games — a lot of games — might help you grow more as a designer than reading and watching YouTube.

1. Do master studies. Take a tiny environment or mechanic of a game you love and reproduce it for education, knowing you'll throw it away. Do this often. Get faster at it.

2. Ask people what their favourite game is. Play it. If it's fun to you, why? If it doesn't resonate with you, why?

3. Internalise the idea that ideas don't matter that much, execution is what matters. Good game designers can make otherwise boring games feel fun to play. (See "the art of screenshake" below.)

4. Make a lot of games. Make them small enough to finish. You don't have to release them all, but you should watch other people play them sometimes.

5. Don't listen to people who tell you not to watch YouTube for game design ideas, there are plenty of great videos out there that have positively changed how I think about game design:

The art of screenshake (starts a little slow, but stick with it!):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AJdEqssNZ-U

Designing to reveal the nature of the universe:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OGSeLSmOALU

Game design is a search algorithm:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o5K0uqhxgsE

There's a lot of great advice in this thread. My take, after 30 years in the industry and stubbing my toe a lot:

1. Make as many small games as possible, but also mod as many games as possible and/or take existing games and tweak/twist them in a bunch of interesting ways. You'll explore some interesting design space without having to build everything from scratch.

2. Show your games off to friendly colleagues/other devs early and often. Earlier than you're ready for (because we're never quite ready!), and in person, if possible. Ask them what they'd do next, if they started with the game you just showed them. Most game devs at a physical community event want you to succeed, and are good at saying, "I'd do XYZ next." You don't have to listen to them, but if you do that enough, you'll get a good picture of how others see your work.

3. Whether you agree with them or not, be aware that GenAI is a sensitive topic for many game devs. Your Reddit post, if I'm seeing the right one, says "AI-powered browser game," which will be strongly divisive. I'd just focus on finding out what people like/dislike about gameplay, as that seems to be what you're looking for feedback on.

4. Design books are good, but I actually think they're an advanced maneuver. This is personal experience only, so take with a grain of salt, but I tend to kinda navel gaze and design-bible a project to death if I'm reading things too early in the process. So, if you've already digested Schell's book, I don't think you need to read a pile more yet.

5. Play as many games as possible, in the area of design you're interested in working. You'll see how people do stuff, you'll avoid making some obvious mistakes, and you'll get a bunch of ideas for stuff that devs aren't doing, that you could try.

Gamedev is tough but fun, and I wish you the best of luck!

I commented on your other thread - but you should really clean up your information diet. From the vocabulary you use and the tone of your game and pitch deck, I can tell you’re someone that hangs on the words of tech industry ‘thought leaders’. You need to realize that most of the people in tech who have time to podcast, write substacks, or otherwise build a ‘personal brand’, aren’t actually making shit. They’re trying to inflate their profile so they can trade reputation for career advancement in any number of ways. It’s also not worth listening to most VCs. Most of them don’t have the time or technical ability to understand the areas they’re investing in and just chase trends. If they had the time and technical abilities, they’d be building companies instead of getting other people to do it for them. You’d be surprised to hear how many investors or personalities that are supposedly high profile are openly derided among actual founders.

The way to make something that’s fun is to try to make something that’s fun over and over again until you’ve got it down. It’s not by obsessively reading what investors or people who are essentially glorified influencers say.

Do game jams! They let you practice skills and helps you learn what sticks.

Big ones like Ludum Dare will also give you feedback on the game, which is good not for improving that gamejam game you made but for learning what things are important with a first impression. You often are meant to leave feedback on other games which is another good way to learn what works and potential pitfalls.

You're welcome to try hard on your first project but project ideas often have to be really really good to stick. Another advantage of doing gamejams is it let's you make something that you can easily just walk away from

I design board games and I think one of the most under utilized skills is studying other games. (There is old advice that says if you want to be a writer, then read more books.) Go back through all the games you like and write up what you love about them. Then, and more importantly, think a lot about HOW the game makes you feel that way or HOW the game gives you the opportunity to explore in some directed way. Then take that lens and re-evaluate the game that you made.

Every board/card game I design starts with a single key idea or mechanic or theme; but they all have a single cornerstone. Every playtest and design change is always looked at through that lens. If there isn't alignment, then you have two choices: ignore the change or considering resetting your cornerstone given what you know now. This really helps to stop thrashing and give focus to your game as you iterate.

The Art of Game Design is a very good jumping off point; it's how i got my start, and it gives you a lot of windows to look through.

A few years after getting that book, I started to work professionally with people building games, mostly white-labelled projects or contract work, which was the studio's bread and butter. But actually working with people developed my understanding of a) the relative value that artists, designers, and animators bring to the project, relative to my own set of skills and b) how to solve the sorts of problems that ship games. I am a programmer, and I use my programmer skills to give designers and artists what they ask for.

All of that to say: the best next step is working with folks, ideally some who have had experience. Book learning will only get you so far.

That being said, here are a few more books I have seen recommended in my sphere:

- The Timeless Way of Building by Christopher Alexander (this is not about games, but design generally)

- Finite and Infinite Games by James P. Carse

- Game Engine Architecture by Jason Gregory (this is a technical book about modern game engines)

Finally, Liz England (a designer who lowkey helped me not lose hope when I was breaking into the industry) has/had a blog where she talks about game design books. I cannot personally vouch for the titles, but I trust Liz England [1]

[1] https://lizengland.com/blog/game-design-library/

Since no one mentioned it yet AFAICT I'll shout out CS50's Intro to Game Dev that uses Love2d (Lua framework): https://cs50.harvard.edu/games/2018/notes/0/

I also really like pico8 for initial dev with lots of rapid feedback. Lazy Devs Academy on YouTube has lots of good Pico8 tutorials, like this intro: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLea8cjCua_P3Sfq4XJqNV... Since pico8 source is often available you can look at it for inspiration, see for example Celeste: https://www.lexaloffle.com/bbs/?tid=2145

Along the same lines suggest the Spelunky book from Derek Yu where he walks through his whole process (and all these Boss Fight Books are great for that) going from GameMaker Studio prototype to finished product: https://bossfightbooks.com/products/spelunky-by-derek-yu

Last but not least, Itch is doing a California Fire Relief Bundle right now https://itch.io/b/2863/california-fire-relief-bundle that includes good gamedev books from Chris DeLeon. See his "Why are you making your own games? " quiz, https://form.jotform.com/233546996151162/

edit: add link to DeLeon to explain

My advice, which you might not see here, is to write about every game you play. And ideally every movie you watch and book you read, too. To develop a sense of your own taste and what makes a game good to you, you have to write your ideas down. Go through the major moments of a game and describe how they made you feel, and what they did to make you feel that way. Dissect the mechanics and identify stuff you liked and stuff that frustrated you.

This is pretty much what college is. You just write essays where you dissect stuff like that and then a professor reads them and gives feedback on your ideas and how you communicate them. You can do the same thing informally with your friends and partners, just discuss games.

I've learned a lot of great general game dev info from Tynan Sylvester's book [0] (creator of Rimworld). Has good info on motivation, rewards, timing, goals, design philosophy, etc.

I have next to no game dev experience and the book is a great intro to a lot of foundational topics imo. NB: the book isn't very technical and is an easy read!

[0] Designing Games: A Guide to Engineering Experiences https://a.co/d/8Im68r8

Gamedev City [0] is a new community and could be a good place for feedback and finding resources in general. As for sharing demos and collecting feedback I personally think itch.io [1] is pretty good.

As far as game improvement is concerned it's important to get in a growth mindset and keep focusing on improving the game, which it sounds like you're already doing.

Finally if you haven't already I would recommend creating a discord or some kind of forum for you game (itch.io has free hosting for them) just so you can collect feedback from people who are interested and invested in it.

[0] https://gamedev.city/

[1] https://itch.io/

Not having developed a game myself, but harbouring aspirations of doing so at some point, I don't have any advice that can be backed up by experience.

However, I did find this game development series[0] by Yahtzee (of Zero Punctuation fame) rather insightful, so perhaps it might help.

I've also watched a few of the videos[1] made by Timothy Cain (Fallout 1/2, Fallout New Vegas, Outer Worlds etc) where he goes into some of the underlying mechanisms of video game design.

[0]: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLAbMhAYRuCUibhDtVUn3WJnHo...

[1]: https://youtube.com/@cainongames?si=PUO0Mf7WKjPRdXAP