Brandon the Game Dev

Your to-do list is ever-growing. You need to play-test your game a few hundred times, commission some art, start a Twitter account, keep your blog up to date, fix that broken mechanic, tweak some minute detail you’re afraid you’ll forget about, all while holding down a 9-5 (or 6 or 7) job and raising kids and paying the bills…

Let’s face it. Sometimes board game development isn’t fun. Sometimes you don’t have time or energy to do what you’re trying to do. Relaxation and recreation can take a back seat to productivity.

Yet that’s self-sabotage because board game development is an intrinsically creative endeavor. Tapping into your innermost creative depths is very hard to do if you don’t meet basic needs first – the easiest of which to ignore or overlook being the need for mental rest.

Game development is hard work. Yet it’s important to take some time to remember why you decided to start in the first place. If you’re a developer, you love games – I’d be willing to take a money wager on that truth if you stay at it for more than three months. Don’t forget why you fell in love with games!

The easiest way to blow off some steam when you’re exhausted from creation is to play some games. Don’t overanalyze them, don’t study them, just play them. Play them badly if you’re too tired to play them competitively.

There may be some days when you can’t play games, or even stand to look at any piece of cardboard with a victory point track printed on it. Go hang out with your friends. Call your loved ones. Exercise. Go outside. Drive 1,000 miles for no reason and with no destination. Do something you always wanted to do. It’s okay. Your game will still be there.

Game development is a marathon, not a sprint. You must work hard and be consistent. Keep showing up and trying week after week. Just make sure you’re running at a sustainable pace.

Game development is a notoriously iterative process. Your final game will bear little resemblance to your first draft. The best way to make a good game is to play-test it to death, hammering out all the inconsistencies and problems. This is incredibly time-consuming and disheartening. Don’t let it bother you.

My first game, War Co., went through 17 iterations before its final version was ready for manufacturing. I think I got off easy.

Feedback and play-testing is critical. Yet even good play-testers can usually only “point and grunt” at the true underlying problems in your game. Before you play-test your game with other people, make sure you know what type of game you’re trying to create. Come up with the basic feeling you want your game to evoke, an overall objective, and basic constraints that make it hard for players to achieve that objective. All mechanics and art must serve this basic feeling.

Accept that you’re using blunt instruments for a finesse operation. Accept that using limited mechanics can cause unforeseen consequences in gameplay. Accept that people will horribly break your game. Accept that your rules are borderline unreadable. Keep going. These kinks will work themselves out with time, feedback, an open mind ready to receive and process that feedback, and hard work.

Take risks. Try things you don’t think will work. Try things that go against traditional wisdom. One of the most praised mechanics of War Co. is that the number of cards you have left is effectively your life. You win by causing your opponent to run out of cards faster than you, often at random. This thwarts the idea of relying on specific combos to win like you might do in games like Magic: the Gathering or Yu-Gi-Oh! because it forces players to abandon the assumption that a certain needed card will eventually turn up. By all means, this shouldn’t have worked. I didn’t expect it to. Even still, I gave it a try and ironed out the details over 7 more versions of the game until it “felt right”.

Trust that you will arrive at your destination. There may be delays. There may be unexpected layovers and missed connecting flights. You may have to circle the airport a few times.

Your destination won’t look like what you first imagined, but it will be better. Strap in and enjoy the journey. It’ll make you a better person. It’ll make your game a better game.