radarhead

even if you're just starting out, DON'T sleep on multiplayer optimization. it's never too early to lay the groundwork for 500,000+ concurrent users and you'll regret it if you have to do it all later

my unsarcastic take is that a tremendous number of game dev people are absolutely unaware of how far ahead of the curve they are, and all their advice is "draw the rest of the owl" type shit. i'm always like "buddy i literally don't understand how a 2d game can have a world larger than one screen, can we start there" and all the advice is like "writing your own lookahead precacher is essential and not nearly as hard as you think"

yeah it is pretty toxic and i have been saying catty shit about Advice Givers for longer than many people have been making games at this point. i'm sure some of it is well-intentioned but it's so often wrapped up in this unstated kind of self-validation process or just simple clout chasing. thing is, i think mentorship and sharing knowledge are incredibly important, so it's not the actual act of giving advice that i think is pernicious here, it's the particular public pose that social media seems to tempt people into adopting. iunno it's hard for me to talk about without feeling like a bitter loser.

The ones I have read on the last two years, have become so overspecialized that very rarely their teaching notes could be of any use outside their use cases. But yes, sometimes you can sense in between lines some smugness or even arrogance. It could be just bad wording, however.

I have a bigger bone to pick with related with the archival of that knowledge. Seeing those floating on Twitter or Discord, rather than in a forum/wiki/encyclopedia/other to archive and index, makes me scream as most of it will be forgotten and gone easily.

Fairly early after I started making games, I noticed how much advice for game developers completely disregards the material conditions under which they work, and what their assumptions about other people's working conditions are. At this point, I just completely ignore any advice that mentions that you should "talk to your team", or something similar, because I know it just does not apply to my situation at all. Also makes it hard to find the advice that's actually useful, because you have to ask yourself every time "does this stuff actually apply to my situation, can it apply?" and it just gets exhausting.

I have a rule regarding game design advice that I like to call the "50% rule". It states that on average 50% of any advice you get regarding a game you are making will be relevant in some way (and conversely 50% will not). I came to rule while I was at a Game Design School tm, and to their credit most of the professors actually gave good advice and wanted to see good games get made.

Also speaking to some of the students there (really any undergrad above freshmen level) could also get you good or better advice than the professors, but you really had to gauge it. There were some people there who 'played platformers' (and this was around the time when indie platformers were big) and they had the best advice around for platformer design. If you knew a few of these guys you could take a shit platformer to a 'hey that's kinda alight tm' platformer in like a week of iterations. For the record, I am not a platformer person.

When it comes to average internet Rando Calrissian, that 50% number is... overly optimistic. Even among people you like/trust/think are cool, It would be hard to convince me of anyone getting above "50% good advice" unless they are working on the same project as you.

The corollary to this rule is that, because there is a decent chance of advice being helpful from experienced sources, you might as well politely listen to it. This is not an excuse to ego trip and claim that 'people don't understand your genius tm' or to disregard everything that people say.

(I have more rule available on request; but reserve the right to change/modify them without notice if they start to be proven consistently untrue.)

I think this might be a Twitter problem? Because the space is limited, you can't caveat everything. I really liked that one GDC talk several people did about how all advice is terrible because it's not only from the past, it's what worked for them, and they're not you.

But yeah for people who are starting out, I try to tell them to find a gamedev community to ask specific questions to. I actually sent someone to your discord because I also told him to start out on Unreal instead of Unity (since he was interested in FPS/3D)