The 42 Immutable Laws of Gamedev
- Use source control or at least make regular backups
- Your game is likely both too boring and too shallow
- Your pitch should include a budget
- Your budget should be justifiable using non-outlier comparators
- A stupid idea that would make your friends laugh is often a great concept
- Criticise a game you hate by making a good version of it
- Changing a core mechanic usually means that you need a new ground-up design
- Design documents are only bad because most people write them badly
- Make the smallest viable prototype in each iteration
- Players need an objective even if they are looking to be distracted from it
- No genre is ever dead or oversaturated
- Games in difficult categories need to be doing something truly exceptional.
- Learn the history of games
- Forget the history of games! Unpredictable novelty arises every year
- Great games have been made by both amazing and terrible coders
- Be as messy as you want to get your game design locked…
- …then think about readability, performance, extensibility, modularity, portability…
- Procedural generation is a stylistic choice not a cost-reduction methodology
- Depth is almost always more important than UX
- Plan for exit even if you plan to never exit
- Your opinion of DLC is likely not based on data
- There’s no point owning your IP unless you use it, license it or sell your company
- PR will always matter but most devs don't understand what PR is
- People want to hear about even the most mundane parts of your dev process.
- Be grateful when you win awards and gracious (or silent) when you don't
- Announce your game and launch your Steam page simultaneously
- Get your Steam tags right
- Make sure your announcement trailer destroys its intended audience
- Excite, intrigue, inspire with possibilities
- Your announcement is an invitation to your game’s community
- Make “be respectful” a community rule and enforce it vigorously
- Celebrate great community members
- Post updates at minimum once per month
- Community trust is established by correctly calling your shots
- Find an accountant who understands games
- Understand salaries, dividends and pension contributions fully
- Find a lawyer you can trust with anything
- Read contracts as if the identity of the counterparty was unknown to you
- A publisher without a defined advantage is just expensive money
- Just because you had a bad publisher once doesn’t mean all publishers are bad
- “Get publisher money” is hustling. “Make a profitable game” is a real ambition
- Keep trying - be specific, optimistic and generous