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10 design lessons from 10 years in games

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10 years ago I started working in the games industry. Along the way I've picked up a few things that I wanted to record (for my own sake!) and share with you. 1. Understand the problem before chasing a solution Don't be tempted to start designing a solution when the problem is not fully explored and understood, take the time to focus on what you're trying to resolve. Make sure you understand what the solution needs to accomplish then formalize your findings, write them down. Develop goals. Present these to other team members, discuss and amend them as required. It's always better to debate the purpose of a feature than to debate a feature with no obvious purpose. 2. Don't pop an idea before it's fully inflated When a new idea or feature is proposed it's tempting to start immediately identifying flaws or concerns. Avoid writing ideas off or designing fixes based on these assumptions. Although these concerns are likely valid it's worthwhile giving the peop...
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Design Notepad: The Perfect Un-planned Feature

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Unplanned features, a concept that doesn't sit well with most game developers (producers I'm looking at you), and rightly so! Additional cost and bugs means they can be risky. After all, they are the very definition of feature creep. However, making games is a creative process. Things change during the course of development, inspiration strikes or something you've been experimenting with turns out to be a huge value add. Not all features are born equal, some are much more suited to being a last minute addition than others. What are the attributes of the perfect unplanned feature? How can we spot them and take advantage? Makes use of what's readily available If the feature can be created with elements from existing systems and assets it's immediately something that's worth at least considering. It's a "modder" approach, taking elements of the games that were created to do one thing and repurposing them to create a variation of a feature or even som...
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New Monitor (165 hz!)

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 I recently picked up a Dell 27" IPS 165hz 1ms S2721DGF Gaming Monitor . It's a bit of a beast. If you're not a monitor nerd, "hz" aka "Hertz" is how many frames it can show on the screen per second. This is also known as refresh rate.  Most monitors display at around 60hz. This means if your game is running at above 60 fps your monitor won't really show it. Enabling a feature like V-sync, which matches the games FPS to the monitors refresh rate will demonstrate this as you will notice (if you are running above 60 fps on a 60hz monitor) that your fps is now clamped at 60. G-sync / Free sync are similar, these features match your monitors refresh rate to your games FPS (freeing up your GPU to pump more frames instead of running V-sync).  If you spot screen tearing in your game, that's usually down to your FPS not matching your monitors refresh rate. So now I have a beefy monitor that is G-Sync / Freesync compatible and can display 165 frames per ...
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