/agdg/ - Amateur Game Development General★

>Extra Credits

C'mon, man. You know better than that.

The only video of theirs that had any merit to it whatsoever was the video game music episode, and even then that was more basic music theory than anything else. Instead of telling you how it COULD be done, they instead tell you how it SHOULD be done, and in doing so confuse newbie devs into thinking that there is only one way to make video games: the Extra Credits way.

>>25498 (OP)

>If you haven't already heard of these guys, they're pretty good at covering the basics but have fallen out of favor since they started making more a more videos about politics in industry instead of how to make games. They still come out with a good one every now and then, just stick to the playlists about design

Get out of my lawn. You aren't from around here.

>>25499

yeah, they have their heads up their asses, but more than one of their videos is on point. I've seen too many prospective devs here and on half chan that desperately need to learn what a MVP is and EC is probably the only channel that frames the concept in terms of making a game.

and they're already very good at broadcasting that they're full of shit without someone pointing it out every time. just let people take what value the videos have to offer and judge the channel for themselves.

Richard garfield characteristics of games. First chapter boring as shit, but then it's worth it

I honestly will never understand why people watch or read advice on how to design games, I understand getting feedback from players of your game only.

There is no excuse to taking courses in designing games when all you need to do is to actually make games by yourself, play good games, see what's good in them, and repeat until you get good.

>>25610

Uh, because they want to make better games?

You sound like an incredibly naive beginner who thinks purity is best, kinda like how many artists think that using photos or filters or references is "cheating" somehow.

There's some very valuable information in 'game designer's toolkit' especially about how to design certain things. There's a ton of things that seem brilliant but you just didn't think of.

For example in this video, it shows how Mario introduces platforms that flip when you jump. They're placed in an elevated ground that you have to jump into, and when you do, the platforms switch before you even get to reach them. It's a very clever tiny bit of level design that can help you think about your game levels in a different way, especially because I think everyone agrees that flat out tutorials are shit 100% of the time.

>>25610

I had a small wall of text going but these two beat me to it >>25614, >>25615.

I'll just add that although feedback is a decent source of information for improving on a game, the Henry Ford quote comes to mind “If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.” (yes I know he never really said that). Malcom Gladwell's TED talk does a good job of showing that even a scientific focus study won't necessarily tell you everything you need to know about your audience.

It's mostly about marketing but I think there are some takeaways for devs trying to make sense of feedback. I think it's an interesting talk regardless.

http://www.ted.com/talks/malcolm_gladwell_on_spaghetti_sauce

>>25615

>Uh, because they want to make better games?

The people giving all this game design advice most likely never made a game themselves, let alone a good game. Or they just try to over analyze everything just because.

I would only take advice either from people criticizing your own game, or veterans who you admire and have created something. You can look at mario jumping all the time if you don't implement it right now, you'll forget every neat trick you saw. Also TED sucks.

Basically what I'm saying is that you should be a DO-er before reading any of this shit, and if something you do fails, you learn from your mistakes and then you read this advice, by doing things wrong or trying to do them you'll learn much faster than trying to copy every gamer design video.

For example there are hundreds of thousands of people who literally take advice from extra credits. Those guys never created anything of value, so why listen to them? Why listen to any random youtube commenter actually? Everyone can say X and Y is great just by looking but I'd only take advice from actual great developers. If you wanna become an indie dev maybe you should look at your favourite indie game and take notes about everything that made it great, much better than watching intellectual masturbation videos.

>>25615

>They're placed in an elevated ground that you have to jump into, and when you do, the platforms switch before you even get to reach them. It's a very clever tiny bit of level design that can help you think about your game levels in a different wa

Ok? And you couldn't notice that by playing the game? By playing it yourself you would notice that and also much more things, you get to experience the whole game and analyze it, instead of someone else telling you.

If you cannot figure out what makes that game great, what makes you think you can make something similar? I'm not saying, stop learning, or stop taking advice because I also ask people for opinions on what I do. And I also look at various videos where some neat shit is shown.

But people place too much importance on reading and watching hundreds of these game dev tips, by people who never made games, and you'll forget everything you saw anyway. I'd rather just play the game and try to copy ideas from it instead.

>>25618

That video is 5 fucking minutes long. Getting to that point in the videogame requires you to buy a console and then buy the game and then spend N amount of hours playing it, and even then you're not guaranteed to notice that aspect of the level design.

>>25617

>>25618

These youtube channels aren't making stuff up, their summarizing information created by people who make video games. Yes, it would be better to experience it all yourself, but you would have to to play dozens of games to get a feel for every death mechanic and how they fit in their system, or hundreds of hours into MOBAs to get the nuances between DOTA and LOL. You don't find painters who trail and error their way into discovering perspective and color theory

Also a lot of design goes into not being noticed, I doubt you would have consciously noticed Super Mario 3D World's lack of a tutorial, or RE4's lack of a difficulty menu. Most people aren't going to bother recording an action game to find the bits that make it feel alive, or bother copying a tech tree into excel to reverse engineer the math behind it. A lot of these videos are just primers, but the good ones give you a peek into the mechanics that aren't advertised in the window so you know where to look for more.

>I'm not saying, stop learning, or stop taking advice because I also ask people for opinions on what I do. And I also look at various videos where some neat shit is shown.

Nothing in this thread implies that learning theory is all you should do, you're the one that game in here and said

>I honestly will never understand why people watch or read advice on how to design games, I understand getting feedback from players of your game only.

So I don't get why you're complaining when this thread is just posting what's available

>>25620

Basically this

Speaking of sources of information. While info from game developers themselves is indispensable, that doesn't mean they can always provide it in a structured way, focusing on important parts. Some important aspects of the game might seem to be trivial for the dev or something that resonated very well with players was not deemed important by the designers. Post-mortems make good reads by the are not be-all and end-all, reviews by non-developers are basically structured player feedback that you can get before driving off volunteers from your game prototype.

Also, looking only at good games is probably a grave mistake.

If you'll take some great game as an example and just copy it, you'll get a copy of that game. It's not visual arts, you won't get good at making games this way. If you start making changes to it without having bad examples, you have much higher chance of repeating those mistakes. Especially when good mechanics is often "just fun", while bad mechanics gets a detailed description why it doesn't work.