5 Tips to keep your Game-Design Motivation up- and running

Things to remember, when a game-project gets difficult.

1. Ideation before Coding

I used to make games, like “having an idea” and then “start coding”. And this was always a very good source of frustration in the end.

What I do now: before writing any line of code, I spend a lot of time just with an very long “ideation phase”. So with ideas, goals, mood-boards, first user-feedback, graphic ideas etc. Usually all this ends up in a tiny Game Design Document.

This is a perfect foundation to finally start coding. Usually much better choices can be made with this Game Design Document (also when it comes to questions like, what Game Engine to use, how to structure the team, etc…)

And the best is:
— you can work on this way also on many ideas at the same time.
— or just “let some ideas out”, without actually killing the actual game project by just another one.

2. Learn about Game-Feel (aka Juicyness or Screenshake) and apply it

The term Game-Feel goes back to Steve Swink. I try to describe it as the “certain feel, your game has”.

For me it was populated and set into action very impressivley by this talk “The Art of Screenshake” by Jan Willem Nijman from Flambeer.