canon

invelica

@canon

i make indie games

unvoiced 2* in a tokyo apartment trying to weld end-of-service anime characters into playstation 1 party games

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canon
@canon
gayanimegirl
@gayanimegirl
farawaytimes
@farawaytimes

How To Make Good Small Games

Hi cohost friends 💖 Just posted my new 6k-word manifesto blog post epic about having radical pride in your art. Give it a read!

gayanimegirl
@gayanimegirl

this has been my ethos as a game developer, so i can vouch for it!

canon
@canon

"small games have different terms for what constitutes “success”. Maybe a game wants you to smile, or have one really good laugh. Maybe it wants to inspire a quiet unease that your conscious brain quickly forgets, but that bubbles up a few days later and sucks air out of your chest. Maybe it’s a hard action challenge you compulsively play and replay until you get a run you’re satisfied with — which only takes thirty minutes, or twenty, or five." hell yeah

anyway this whole piece rules

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in reply to @farawaytimes's post:

kaikue
@kaikue

Great post, this puts into clear words a lot of the same thoughts I've been having for the past few years. I like how you sprinkled in a bunch of links to short games throughout as inspiration. The only thing I would add is that for point 11, making games for jams is an easy way to get a guaranteed audience (especially if you play & comment on other participants' games, because of how itch shows your own game on your comments). Jams are also a good way to force a small scope, since they have a short time limit. But of course, jams have lots of limitations, so they're not a solution to everything.

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farawaytimes
@farawaytimes

Yeah, jams are great! A time limit is a great way to get someone to scope down when they're not used to doing it. If I have an issue with them, it's that a lot of devs wind up making little vertical slices of larger stories. I like my games to feel finished and complete -- I've made games for several jams in the past, but I've never finished any within the time limit because I always needed a few more days to get everything just how I wanted it.

But that's what works for me. If jams get folks making games they're happy with, whether or not they match my ideal of "finished", I think that completely rules.

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vinizinho
@vinizinho

As someone who often recommends starting game devs to play tiny games, I found myself nodding hard while reading this. I particularly love the argument against "getting your first 10 bad games out of the way", specially since this idea is so ingrained in the official Game Development(TM) discourse. You use the word "homework" and I think that's so spot-on: indeed any starting dev is going to have to learn a lot, but there's no reason why they couldn't do it while making something fun and worthwhile, specially if they change their mindset. Anyway, a wonderful post. Thank you for writing this!

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farawaytimes
@farawaytimes

Thanks for reading!! Yeah, I've seen a lot of devs that successfully made like a dozen games and are really down on their work because it's not a big expensive production like Celeste or what not. I think that's really sad... I'd much rather folks have an ideal of "success" that's attainable without burning up like five years of their life to make a mega-project.

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sarksus
@sarksus

I really love this post. This is something I have struggled with in the past 5-10 years. The games I want to make are big and difficult to build. The game engines I want to use are big and difficult to learn. The small games suggested when starting out (Pong, Breakout, etc) are not the kinds of games that interest and motivate me. I thought small games were boring because I was so focused on those suggestions.

What ended up working for me is very similar to what you suggest. Breaking down the big immersive social sim game in my head into smaller, recognizable pieces led me to realize I don’t need Unreal Engine or Godot just yet. I can accomplish a lot of my goals with just Twine. It’s easier to learn and I already know JavaScript so as I expand the scope from a static story to something more dynamic there’s less to learn. I get to focus on story and character writing and gameplay systems which is the most important thing to me in the first place. The immersive 3D world can come later.

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farawaytimes
@farawaytimes

Yesssssss it's SO satisfying to realize you can scrape off like 90% of the work for some dream project and still make the part you REALLY care about. (And yeah, Twine rules!)

A couple years back I was writing a visual novel that ballooned in story scope, and I got really scared I wouldn't be able to finish it. I wound up realizing I didn't actually care about the visual novel part, that I was just trying to make a VN because I identified as a game dev instead of a writer. I released the story as a prose novel instead, and I have absolutely zero regrets about it.

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SleepyNuigurumi
@SleepyNuigurumi

I think this might of helped me greatly. Or some degree. Too drowsy & out of it a few ways to tell. So thx at least for a bit more hope for now. I hope parts to this perspective help me live a bit better & grow towards reasons for happy moments, & feelings of self fulfillment I lack in a few important ways. Read half of it in a speed reader at 300 then 400 wpm & then had my ear noise ring, took a stop and realized it's important enough to me now to read the rest. Which I did more standardly.

Thx for your post / blog thingy. I think it helped. So thank you. Hoping it leads me to better things & more actions taken towards development that can make me feel better in many ways. I hurt mentally in a few. Thx for hope. Sorry for drowsy repeating message jumble, thx for reading person who reads this if so.

I should sleep.

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