Hello Boghog! I am a huge fan of your channel I just wanted to ask: how did you learn how to approach understanding game design? After watching your and The electric underground's discussion around arcade game design, I wanted to learn about how arcade game design and the whole concept of game design itself in order to understand games more and possibly make one of my own, but I never knew how to go about doing so. Hope this makes sense and isn't too broad of a question.
Hell ye, glad you're digging my content & shit!
Take this with a grain of salt cause I don't really know what helped me since it was such a slow and gradual process but I think for arcade game design you want 3 things.
The first one, above the others by far is :
-
Make stuff & get feedback, don't get stunlocked by theory - it's all bullshit. Don't waste time reading game design theory if you're not making stuff. All it'll do is make it harder to start, cause paralysis due to overthinking, doubt, insecurity, etc. Just make stuff. Make 1:1 clones of simple games you like, make prototypes, make small new games, make big failed projects that'll have to be scrapped, make finished games, get player feedback, use it to make more stuff. You'll learn a ton on your own through trial & error. Theory is supplementary and most of it is hard to truly understand unless you're actively making stuff IMO. Almost all my writing/vids is just notes for problems I'm working on in my own games (when it's not me being salty about some argument I had or something)
-
Learn the basics of animation (12 principles), do exercises with simple shapes/stick figures, etc. This will help a lot in all sorts of ways. Feel is probably the most important part of action games, and feel is basically just animation principles being applied in different ways with some extras. Even if you have static immobile sprites moving around, you're still animating with code at the end of the day. Any sorta movement, which is key for action games, is gonna involve animation.
-
1cc a bunch of arcade games, dabble in some scoring, dabble in some speedrunning, etc. If you can get feasibly get to a high level, do it. If not, at least get comfortable. It might seem like much but compared to learning basically any necessary gamedev skill, it's nothing. Gamedev is intuitive, arcade dev is extremely intuitive and nuance-driven, so build up a library of experiences you can draw from that'll improve your intuitions. You wanna launch a game you're working on, be able to instantly spot weird stuff and go "this feels off", and then investigate further.
