tayl1r
@tayl1r

i feel like the game design content that gets recommended to me on youtube is really just taste validation for gamers. who want to feel smart for liking a game with a smart thing.

rather than focusing on how to design things, how to go from a blank slate to mechanics, levels, useful data input, docs, team communication, or whatever, instead it is an excuse to just describe back the final player experience of popular games (souls or nintendo properties) with some often interesting, yet surface level observations and speculations.1

and i get it. it's fun, easy to digest content with an obvious emotional investment, for an audience that actually exists! you're not going to get mass appeal going after actual game designers. who probably could figure out that mario jumps in a vague parabola.2

and i don't think this content is bad or cynical. it's nice to know i'm cool for liking various best-selling games. and it's nice that people are passionate about design. buuut it does bug me that it's often dressed up as teaching the craft.

if you are thinking of becoming an artist there are an amazing amount of resources. you’ve got experts in the field, sometimes literally the artists you are a fan of, producing tutorials, time lapses, process pictures, art live streams, theory explanations, shaded spheres, arrows on colour wheels, diagrams of coloured lines bouncing into eyes, light going into prisms, source files with layers for penis on/off, etc.

given all that, it would be odd to instead watch someone who has never drawn anything before, zoom in on a finished piece of art they had no involvement with, to say it uses brushes (and brushes are also techniques found in dark souls).

i realise this comes across as gatekeeping. i don't think you need experience to talk about design or judge if a design is good, and i appreciate it is hard to get experience because to practice and learn you often need other disciplines and skills. but if you're going to act like a design resource... err. hey, look over there


  1. did you know that in a "metroidvania" -- a portmanteau of metroid and castlevania; you get items (keys) that allow access to new areas (doors)? yes. because that is what the genre name means.

  2. mario’s jump actually has a lot of complexity with horizontal momentum and button release but that stuff is hard to put on a prageru-ass graph


You must log in to comment.

in reply to @tayl1r's post:

I'm so fascinated (and disappointed) by a yt channel called Design Doc: https://youtu.be/ThDVGP4UB30?feature=shared

The thumbnails and graphic design are so good, the choice of topics are so good, the narration is decent...but as far as I know the 2 ppl making it dont really have game design experience. So at the end of the day all of the videos are basically just fan observation and speculation.

Which...isnt the end of the WORLD necessarily. I would almost rather the videos were framed as like historical discussion? Like "the history of turn based combat" "the history of bosses with multiple phases", things like that. That way it wouldnt be claiming to be design advice, and they could keep the videos nearly the same as they are.

yeah, i watched their video on multi-phase bosses just recently. i think each section has a valid point to make. like, i guess it does suck if your boss fight is a slog? hey, don't do that, game designers!

but it felt like the real meat of the video is: wasn't the kingdom hearts sephiroth fight awesome? remember this move, and this move, and this move, and don't forget his huge balls. post your favourite multi-phase boss fights in the comments! gamer taste validation.

eh, it's probably not a big deal tho. maybe this was a silly post i made.

Nah i think its a post worth making! I feel selfish but i wish i could get good design advice and well-edited YT polish all in one package, but its so rare. Thankfully the Sakurai videos have some nuggets of wisdom.

I find it particularly hard to find firsthand advice about turn based combat. It feels easier to find design advice about side scrollers, shooters, etc.

Unfortunately, that kind of in-depth game design content can really only be found in lectures from experienced game designers. Who suck ass at making a compelling YouTube video because that's a completely orthogonal skill.

I've seen my fair share of gamedev videos that veer into "game review video" territory but with angry/happy gamer rhetoric replaced with a veneer of instructive objectivity. I just take it as a critical thinking challenge. What I end up looking for is reproducibility and ability to apply whatever they're saying to something else- examples where it works, and where it doesn't. I don't look into pre-credentials though; anyone can make an insightful point about design, especially in an industry this new.

Before seeing all of that on youtube, though, my main sources of "game design theory" content came from gamasutra (now gamedeveloper.net) and adjacent blogs where designers just wrote out their stuff. And I saw many talking points on the well-produced videos lifted and condensed from these sources (some with clear citations in the videos themselves). I think the time and effort it takes to turn all that into digestible video is the real bottleneck that handicaps gamedev youtube in comparison.

Pinned Tags