I tried to design one of them thar vidjamagame things. In the process, I gained vast amounts of knowledge, wisdom, and learned many valuable lessons about myself. I may have fought a Balrog. Then I forgot all of it. But hey, videogames!

1. Ch-ch-changes — I already knew that game design isn’t some rigid, unchanging process, but the degree to which a bunch of small, seemingly unimportant decisions ended up shaping my game really shocked me. For instance, my initial idea made no mention of the setting or style. No aesthetics – just mechanics. I’m not really an artsy person, either, so the idea of dreaming up a “look” didn’t really appeal to me. Honestly, I put it off until the very end. And then everything just clicked. The minimalist art style became fertile soil for a cryptic, player-focused storyline and simple character interactions. Now I can’t imagine my game any other way.

2. I want it all — Videogaming is an incredibly versatile medium. It’s quite tempting, then, to design a game around the “wouldn’t this be awesome?” principle. That is, cram a bunch of cool ideas together without any regard for how well they fit together. Toss in a hundred kitchen sinks, basically. As a result, I had to leave a number of ideas on the cutting room floor, and – in some cases – it was kind of painful. For instance, my game could have had in-depth RPG elements, stylish Devil May Cry-style combat, an open world, co-op multiplayer, and a number of other bullet-point-worthy features. But that would have obscured my game’s central point, and quality should always be more important than quantity.

3. Anything you can do — Games are versatile, but they’re not limitless. In going about creating my game, I realized that games – at least, as we now know them – are terrible at certain aspects of storytelling. Convincing, fully realized characters, for instance. Really, the more details and variables you put into a game, the more of a teetering tower it becomes. One wrong move, and the whole illusion will come tumbling down. As a result, I designed my game specifically to tell a story that maximizes gaming’s strengths and sweeps its weaknesses under the rug.

4. Sky’s the limit — Except it’s not, because people’s limited visions of what a videogame could be really irked me. Yes, games as we now know them have their limits, but given hypothetical infinite resources, can’t people do better than “combination of Popular Game X and Popular Game Y”? Evidently not. But I don’t necessarily blame a general lack of creativity. Rather, I blame the conditions in which the gaming industry currently exists. Genre lines – despite being in this subtle state of flux – have this perception of being set in stone. Does a game use a first-person perspective? Then it’s FPS. No ifs, ands, or buts. Popular genres and big names (Call of Duty, Halo, etc) rule the day, and they limit players’ perceptions of what games can (or indeed, should) be. That’s an incredible shame. How can creative games thrive in an environment that’s been specifically bred to suffocate them?

5. There aren’t enough games with zombies — Just kidding. There are. Please stop.

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