Beginner game dev tips

Part 1: To build a game

Introduction

I recommend using Godot engine since it is free and open source.
There are two aspects to game development when you start out: technical and design. It is recommended to start by learning the technical aspects of the game engine by making games that already exist. Try pong and breakout. This way, you do not yet need to worry about balance in game design. Once you have become familiar with how to build something, start experimenting with game design and implement your own design.

Research

Research plenty. Find and play a lot of games including those that are not popular. Deconstruct and analyse the games you play. Learn from experts through seminars, interviews, online videos such as Game Developer Conference. Watch and read reviews and criticisms. Increase your collection of perspectives.

Observe and learn from the world around you. Watch the way people behave, the way animals and insects behave. Ask yourself how you can gamify it. What is the person or the animal trying to achieve? What are they capable of doing and what are the obstacles? What can be added or removed to make it more entertaining? How can rewards be integrated?

Ask yourself what can be changed in an existing game to make a different game or make it more entertaining. In order to be able to come up with ideas, you must first possess knowledge regarding the kind of things that can be added. For this, you need to research and find as much information as possible. If you are unable to solve a problem or do something effectively with the knowledge you currently possess, you should acquire more knowledge or change the way you see the information at hand.

Mental fixedness is a barricade to creativity and you should try to see things from more than one perspective. Learning from everyone and everything allows you to see things in many different ways.

Challenge

Provide challenges to the player along with the tools and information necessary to overcome the challenges. The tools and information should be given at a reasonable pace instead of everything being handed to them at once and overwhelming them.

Fill The Glass is an indie game with a clear concept from the beginning. The player quickly understands what to do and how. Once the foundation is established, challenges are introduced. The jug movement becomes more challenging as it comes close to being empty. The player can also manually choose a harder mode by picking up a specific glass.

Challenges are of many kinds. Examples of motor skill based challenges include controlling a race car or a character in a platformer. Other kind of challenges are focused on the player's cognitive processes such as memory or problem solving skills, and these can be seen in puzzles and strategy games.

Feedback

Feedback (audio, visual, haptic) is a crucial part of communication. Feedback can often encourage the player to repeat an action or avoid it. What usually makes a videogame effective is constant feedback.

In Fill The Glass, filling a glass with water, despite being a simple and ordinary concept, is made interesting through feedback (and challenge).

There is a wide variety of audio feedback for every action that can be performed by the player. There is feedback when a glass is picked up, when it is put back down empty, when it is being filled, when it is put down full, and when it falls down.

Some games provide haptic feedback through controller for almost every little thing happening on the screen. This makes interactions and the whole experience more responsive and immersive.

Jonas Tyroller made a game in which he made it fun to press a button with the help of feedback.

Information is crucial to the player in making decisions. When a player fails to complete a task, it should not be so because the game did not provide them adequate information or in a clear manner. Whenever the player does something or tries to do something, the game should provide informational feedback to let the player know what their actions are achieving or not achieving.

Testing

Have your game playtested by a few people before releasing it. Players often find bugs and glitches you may have missed, and playtesting also helps in evaluating how effective the game design is.

If your game's difficulty level seems reasonable to you, it will most likely be extremely challenging to the players. This is because you understand how your own game works and you have played it many times, but a new player will try your game for only about 20 seconds before deciding to drop it if they do not like it or understand it.

Accessibility

Videogames were once praised for having accessibility features, but now it is the norm to have them in almost every game. Gameaccessibilityguidelines.com provides good information on how to make your game accessible to a wider range of players.

Start making

Set a deadline and try to complete developing the game before the deadline. Just start making something even if it is never going to be published. If you wait to start or finish a project, it is unlikely to ever be finished. It is through experience and reflection of your experience that you learn.

Part 2: Participate in game jams

Why game Jam?

A game jam is an event where participants try to make a videogame from scratch. It can have rules and a theme, and it usually lasts between one day and one month. Game jams are opportunities for you to prototype ideas and check whether they are as good as you thought they would be before making a large game. You also get to meet new people and learn from them. Networking is also great if you plan on building a career in this field.

Team

Most game jams have Discord servers. Join them to find teammates. Team up with one or two members—ideally an artist and a music composer. Having someone working along with you makes it easier for you to focus on your own speciality.

Resources

Gather references for visuals and audio so the artist and music composer would know what kind of aesthetic and mood to aim for.

Create a shared spreadsheet with a list of all the required assets and progress. Allow your team to update the spreadsheet. This helps the team to see quickly and clearly what is required and how much is completed.

Working as a team can also lead to a better game since each element has a specialist working on it. However, having too many teammates can be challenging to coordinate with and to maintain consistency if you are a beginner.

Scope

Keep the scope small. Spend most of your time polishing the core mechanics, gameplay loop, and the level design. More mechanics does not necessarily mean it is a better game, but a game with well-polished mechanics and gameplay means it is more likely to be a good game. It is better to full-ass a few things than half-ass many things.

Reflect

Share the progress of your game with others from early on during development and consider their feedback.

At the end of the jam, take feedback from other developers and from players, and reflect on it. Write down the feedback somewhere easily accessible—maybe in the project folder. This helps keep track of your growth and experience.

Analyse others' games and learn from those games while also providing feedback to the devs.

1. What did you like about their game?
2. What was difficult to do or understand?
3. What could be changed for a more enjoyable experience?

Take feedback from your teammates—ask them what you could have done differently to make their work easier. This helps you better plan or communicate with teammates in the future.

Write a postmortem—mention what you aimed for, what worked out, what did not work out, and what could have been done differently to make it work. This helps you reflect and learn from your experience.