Speaker A
today I want to talk to you about the idea that you should make small games so why do people give you this advice in the first place but more importantly why is it so hard to follow because even if
Indie Game Clinic explains why small games help developers finish and polish, and how to use design constraints to scope a game.
Key Takeaways
- Smaller scope lets you put more care, polish, and quality into each part of a game.
- Design constraints chosen around your skills and goals can drive creativity and make a game distinctive.
- Every constraint should be justified by the game's theme or fiction so it feels natural to players.
- Prototype and test the core loop before expanding scope.
What the video covers
- Small games are advised because projects take longer than estimated, and finishing a smaller game builds momentum and experience.
- The deeper reason for small scope is attention: spreading effort across many systems leaves each one below the quality of competing games.
- Players choose the better of two similarly priced games, so a small game polished to a high standard has a higher chance of success.
- Knowing the advice is not enough; developers often overreach because they lack reference points from playing small games.
- Examples such as Minit, Ruinverse-style minimal designs, Downwell, and Mini Metro show how limiting scope yields distinctive games.
- Mini Metro was made for a game jam with deliberate constraints: no characters to animate and no bespoke level design.
- Developers should identify what they can already do well and what they want to learn, then build constraints around that.
- Each constraint should be justified within the game's fiction or theme so it feels intentional rather than limiting.
- Constraints should be tested early with prototypes to check whether the core moment-to-moment gameplay is fun.
- Once a small prototype works, it can be expanded or polished, but scope should grow only after the core loop proves appealing.
Chapters
- 00:00Why developers are told to make small games
- 02:30Attention, quality, and competing with other games
- 05:20Learning from examples of small games
- 08:20Mini Metro and the value of constraints
- 12:00Choosing your own design constraints
- 17:00Justifying constraints through theme and fiction
- 21:30Testing prototypes and scoping up or down
- 25:20Closing thoughts
Full Transcript — Download SRT & Markdown
Speaker A
you know why you should make small games a lot of people just still try and do these big over ambitious projects anyway so you know I'm going to talk through these different perspectives like why do people give you this advice and I think
Speaker A
there is a fundamental misunderstanding of what this advice is for a lot of the time is that you know people will say oh you should make smaller games because you'll finish them and that is true that is part of the reason why you should
Speaker A
make small games is if you if you set out to make a game that you think will take six months it will actually take a year right so if you set up to make a game that only takes one month you're
Speaker A
going to have a game in two months right there is a certain amount of it that is about manageability and just making sure that you can make the things that you want to make but I think the real reason
Speaker A
that a lot of people giving your advice will gloss over is simply that if you try to make a big thing then your attention is going to be divided by all of these smaller parts of that big thing
Speaker A
so if you try to make staru Valley you've got to write a good story you've got to create a good user interface and a good inventory system you've got to you know create so many different things if any one of those parts of your game
Speaker A
is not up to the standard of of another game in the market that does the same things better then that game is going to be a failure right people are not not going to play your game they're not
Speaker A
going to choose to play your game when there is another game that costs the same or less that does all of those things better so if your goal is to make games to sell and because you want people to play what you make then your
Speaker A
goal should be to make something of high quality right and you're always going to get the higher quality Thing by trying to do less to a higher level of quality so one of the reasons you should make small games and shouldn't set out to
Speaker A
make large games until you've made a few small games is is basically the small your game is the higher quality each part of that game can be and that means that your game has a higher chance of success the amount of care and time and
Speaker A
polish that you can put into that game is going to be way higher than trying to make a 30h hour or a 300H hour game with the same resources right so think about the end quality of what you're trying to
Speaker A
produce if you want to make games and sell them and for people to notice them and care about them or want to play them then your goal should always be to be as good as the other things in in your
Speaker A
target category and if you make your target category 300 hour RPGs then you're basically fighting with with things like Boulders gate and stuff like that which is I know some people have these projects that they work on for years and
Speaker A
years and years they just keep adding stuff to it and if you're doing that as a hobby and that's your hobby project then that's fine but it's not necessarily how you make a high quality game that other people will care about
Speaker A
now a lot of you will have heard everything I just said before someone will have told you this but I think the place where a lot of us fall down is like how do I actually action that you
Speaker A
know I had a very humbling experience with this recently where I started trying to teach myself gdau because the only engine I really know how to use very well is game maker and I thought it would be nice to have an engine that can
Speaker A
do 3D to a higher standard so I thought I'd start letting good do and I came across this problem that every idea I had was was too ambitious you know I wanted to do an RTS uh I wanted to do
Speaker A
things that were weigh ahead of my skill curve straight away and I can't because actually an RTS requires me to know how to manipulate lots of different things in the game um so I empathize with the idea that it is hard to have ideas for
Speaker A
small games but I think one of the reasons for this is that a lot of us just do not play enough small games right so we just don't have a reference point minute is a great example of a
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small game this is like probably the most minimalist interpretation of Zelda that you could come up with but you die every 60 seconds and then you go to the last checkpoint and uh it's it's it's just a really good example of how
Speaker A
you would make a very very minimalist Zelda I think rimmed capsule I don't know if you've ever played this it's a little sort of mini RTS game where you're building a base out of tonos and then getting attacked and the different
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color rooms do different stuff and again it's just a really neat way of of taking a genre that's normally really big and too complicated and simplifying it so that it's easier to make uh easier to do the kind of um the visual design of it
Speaker A
cuz it doesn't have people to animate all of those kind of things and what's this it downwell another good example of a very small game and I mean there's hours and hours and hours of gameplay in this game but because the game is
Speaker A
limited to moving downwards it just removes certain other things that that would have made this a much bigger project for for the developer to complete and mini Metro another example of a game that just doesn't have any kind of representations of characters or
Speaker A
people in it there's been some really good interviews with the developers of mini Metro where they talk about how it came about I'll leave a link to the game developer article but they basically talk about when they made the initial uh
Speaker A
mini Metro game it was for ludmar I think it was for a game jam and they basically set themselves a bunch of limitations on on what sort of idea they would have for the game Jam in the first place so they basically said
Speaker A
we don't want to have to animate characters right so what is a game that allows us to not have characters we also don't want to do loads of level design loads of bespoke levels uh which you think of certain types of games they
Speaker A
require levels right so if you say I'm going to make a platformer right unless you're making an endless Runner that is generating the levels you've set yourself up to be in a position where your game requires levels that's how it
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gets it's kind of longevity from and when they were making mini Metro they set thems a a a kind of constraint a limitation to say our game will not have lots of consecutive levels with different content in them and and the
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the eventual game they made does sort of Veer away from that a little bit but in order to make the initial game they had these constraints right no characters no levels What can we make and you get this
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game that has sold millions and millions of copies because it's worked with a set of con straints that allow it to be a good game if you don't set yourself constraints then you end up doing loads of stuff that you're not good at you say
Speaker A
oh well I'm not going to hire an animator and I can't animate but I want to make a game about a character running around well you've just shut yourself in the foot cuz you've made this decision to make a type of game that you're
Speaker A
incapable of making and then you're just kind of hoping that the end quality of that thing will be decent right again that's fine if you're doing game jams and you're just learning and you're you're making games just to try stuff
Speaker A
out that's totally fine but if you're making games because you want to make a good game one of your starting points should be to try and constrain yourself or limit yourself based on what you know you can do well so once you've got some
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constraints then you can start to look at games that use the same constraints and get inspiration from them because part of the problem with the advice that tells people to make smaller games is as I said you don't have a reference point
Speaker A
so when you're just sitting there daydreaming about games you're thinking about The Witcher and you're thinking about slay The Spar and you're thinking about all of these great games you've played you're not coming at it from the point of view of a crafts person and
Speaker A
thinking what can I make okay how do I make the best version of that you're coming at it from the point of view of a gamer and thinking what is a game it has quests it has loot it has all of these
Speaker A
things if you come up from the point of view of a crafts person you would basically start your project by saying what do I know how to do you know what can I do to a decent level of quality
Speaker A
what do I not know but want to learn that I can incorporate into this project and then what are the things that I just flat out know that I can't do right and I see so many games on this channel
Speaker A
where quite frankly the weakest part of the game is something that the developer just doesn't have any skills in maybe they're a programmer and they've done all the art themselves and they've just been too ambitious with the art and it's
Speaker A
not something they can pull off and their game has suffered and it's like well you either needed to get an artist or seriously concentrate learning art or you needed to come up with an idea in the first place that didn't require you
Speaker A
to make whatever part of the art is is troubling them like didn't need you to create characters right you know I think dredge is another really good example of this because you don't have any 3D modeled characters that exist in the
Speaker A
game world if you were building dredge right if you'd come up with this game and you were building it you could have made so much of this game before you put these little character illustration portraits in yeah it's a it's a game
Speaker A
game that has a world with people in it but the people are not actually represented as little models walking around and that's another example of just having a constraint across the whole game that then makes the game easier to easier to produce because
Speaker A
you're saying we are not animating 3D characters walking around we're only animating boats and creatures that is like the crafts persons or the Craftsman's way of looking at things what do I already know how to do what do
Speaker A
I want to learn how to do and what am I so bad at that should just not be included in this project a lot of developers don't do that part they just try and do everything even if they can't
Speaker A
and then later on they end up with this game and they're like I might as well stick it on Steam and there's some element of it maybe it's the art maybe it's the storytelling maybe it's the interface or the sound design just some
Speaker A
element of it that is so weak because this person is trying to do something they have no skills in and these problems are all ones that we can fix by practicing design by constraint the idea that you are designing something based
Speaker A
on a set of limitations that you think of beforehand right so in mini Metro's case the limitations are there are no characters visible in the in the world uh there are not loads of levels and and so on and so on so what I'm going to do
Speaker A
now is try and give you some sort of examples of how I would think this problem through uh as as I approach like starting a new game so what I want to do is come up with a constraint that doesn't stop my game
Speaker A
being good but stops my game becoming larger than it should be or more complex than it should be so I'm going to pick a constraint that limits a bunch of other stuff in my game and then after that we
Speaker A
can start to look for other games that have the same constraint and to get ideas from them right so my my first constraint I don't want to do a story right I just want to focus on making a
Speaker A
game and and making a fun experience and I don't want to tell a story at the same time and I would always advise people who are new game developers or on their first two or three games is is pick one
Speaker A
pick a lane learn how to tell stories or learn how to make games and make fun game mechanics you can combine those things later on but most people do not have what it takes to combine them both from the start uh it's just too much
Speaker A
extra work you don't need to be trying to learn both those skills at the same time so I'm not making a story game that's one of my first constraints that cuts off loads of things it means I don't have to do dialogue boxes or
Speaker A
anything like that if the game I'm making becomes good then later on maybe I can layer some of this stuff in and I can start to think about how characters talk to each other other and stuff in the world but for the purpose of the new
Speaker A
idea we're throwing that out the window to start with because ultimately we're trying to protect my time my sanity by not setting out to make something too big before I even know that the thing is good right that's the the proper way to
Speaker A
do game development is prove an idea with play testers before you try and build it into something big you know even if you know when people say make small games you sort of roll your eyes and say no I'm ambitious I want to make
Speaker A
a big thing even if that's the case your big thing should start as a small thing time and time again on this show I get sent games where people have made so much content so many levels and what
Speaker A
they really needed to do was nail down the core of their game in a single level or two levels like a a very small vertical slice their game make that really really good and make sure it's something that people can get excited
Speaker A
about before they invested more time in making that into a bigger game it makes me really sad to see these big projects that people have worked on in isolation for months or years and just keep adding more and more content to and are
Speaker A
basically polishing a turd because they are adding content to something that no one wants content for because the decor gameplay isn't there so even if your goal is to make a big thing with loads of content loads of levels loads of play
Speaker A
time your initial goal should still be to make a small version of that thing so all of this stuff still stands even if you don't agree with the make small Games first rule then even if you want to make big games you should be starting
Speaker A
off with making a smaller version of that game and testing it before you make loads of extra stuff for it so my first constraint no story we can worry about story content later on when we know that our game is
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actually a game and that people want to play it but my big mechanical constraint here is going to be single screen I haven't really thought this through yet I just got feeling that it's going to be a good constraint that leads to lots of
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other constraints uh because it means that we don't have to make levels so much as kind of Arenas and then what I'm going to do now is basically kind of create a brainstorm of games that have this same constraint so again remember
Speaker A
we're trying to think like a crafts person right we want to make something good we want to make something that was is within our skill set and expands our skill set but doesn't pull us into territory where we're doing stuff that
Speaker A
we're going to absolutely suck at right so rather than starting from the point of view of what do I want to make or what do I find interesting that can come back later that's I'm not saying ignore your own interests but what I'm going to
Speaker A
do is now we've got this constraint of a single screen game just kind of do a a mood board here of collecting other games that share this constraint and by by single screen I mean like a game where you never move out of the same
Speaker A
location and it's always on the same screen right and I'm going to just see how many games I can find that fit that criteria uh because that might give us some interesting ideas from the get-go so overcooked I think fits this Bild
Speaker A
very well that's a single screen game but it's a multiplayer game that only works as a multiplayer game that's fine but it still gives us a model for the types of interactions that might be cool in a single screen game even if it was a
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one player game and going back a bit further we could think of something like bomber man you got very abstract games like puzzle bubble not to be confused with puzzle bubble we got stuff like bubble bubble this kind of thing where
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characters are in a single screen Arena and it's kind of like a combat platformer so if I was to try and remake any of these four games I'd not need to move cameras around I'd not need to make
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loads of levels because I could just make this one environment and play test the core concept of my game loads and loads before I start worrying about making other Arenas or levels or those kind of things even with these few
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examples there's some stuff to think about here you know there's a framing to the arena of like why we can't go outside and do other stuff there's always a wall around it that kind of helps to explain why this is a single
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screen game and I think if I add a theme to my game cuz I've got I've got my constraints up here let's say Pirates right now our Pirate game examples loads of stuff in them and you know quite
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frankly games that were made by Massive teams of of dozens if not hundreds of people and we don't want to do that we don't want to replicate that so if I want to make a game about Pirates cuz
Speaker A
that's my theme and that's the thing that I I enjoy how can I combine these things how can I make Pirates and single screen work together well if I look at these other games they all have an inworld reason why the
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game is a single screen they have a wall or a border around the outside so if I start to kind of think of my theme and my constraint together I can start to think well actually the board around the
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outside of a level or whatever could also be the sea right so if I made a game that is about being on an island then we are making the theme and the constraint work together so we've got a you know a logical reason why our
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game is single screen and it ties into the theme of it being a pirate based game so imagine I've got a single screen and it is representing an island of some sort I'm going to put some going to put
Speaker A
some palm trees on there let's find a transparent PNG of a palm tree amazing look at that 10 out of 10 would hide my treasure here oh yeah I will grant this is a very weird way of Designing a game but you can start to
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see how this way of approaching things would benefit you right because having the constraint like my game will be single screen or my game won't contain characters or whatever it is you can then put that in conversation with your
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theme and you can start to make decisions that combine these two things so that then your constraint starts to make sense right because whatever the game play is on docs cool Island the the single screen constraint makes sense
Speaker A
because the the water is cutting off the edges of the island you know it might have some bays and stuff like that in it you can then it kind of looks like a piece of cheese single screen isn't the only
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constraint you could come up with your constraint could be uh there's only one weapon in your game you know your character has one gun it could be uh that your game has no characters that you never represent characters you only
Speaker A
show vehicles and buildings that's another constraint that's kind of how dredge works and the point is once you've got that constraint and you Loosely know what the theme of the game is that you're trying to make these can start to talk to each
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other and produce things like this right and by this I just mean the fact that we have an island that takes up most of a screen and we have no reason to like pan our camera away or need to do anything
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fancy with that so we've got a constraint that makes our lives easier as developers because we're we're not making like massive environments that we have to travel across and have Variety in and so on but we're doing it in such
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a way that it makes sense to the player because you always need a player facing reason to do things right you might do a thing because it's easier for you to do right you say well we're going to do
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this art style and not this art style because I'm better at this art style but you still need a player facing reason for that so the player facing reason should be that this art style is more exciting or more evocative or no one's
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done a game like this with this art style in before right the constraint side of things like I made a game with no characters cuz I can't draw characters that's not a selling point for a player a player needs a reason
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that is about them for for these things to be so you know if we go back to dredge as an example you have no physical 3D characters in dredge right and that might be a constraint that was initially there to make the game easier
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to make but that is not a reason why a player would like it right so you have to you have to think of the difference between your constraints that are there to make your development easier and how you translate that into something that a
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player is going to like now I would say in dredge the thing that you end up with is a very Charming world that looks kind of toy like and that plays really nicely with the horror themes of the games cuz
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they're kind of contrasting so by having this constraint they've created a world that kind of feels like a toy and then that kind of gives some of the game its mood and so on but when you have a
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constraint like no characters or the game text place on a single screen you then have to put it in conversation with your game's theme and then make decisions that incorporate both the developer constraints and the appealing theme because players don't care about
Speaker A
what's easier for you as a developer to do they care about their own experience and what you're trying to do is find the ideal world where your constraints line up with the thing so if I decide that I'm making a pirate game and I'm making
Speaker A
a single screen game then I can think of an island as a sort of metaphorical way for justifying why my game happens on a single screen so let's give another example here of you know a game which still uses the same theme and
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the same constraints right so another pirate game with a single screen you know we could have a single screen game about Pirates where the entire game is based around a cross-section of the ship and see it from the side and you manage
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what's happening inside the ship and it's like a little kind of fallout shelter type thing once we know this core gameplay of managing the ship is fun we can expand that game out later and we can have like Choose Your Own
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Adventure sections when you find an island and stuff like that but the point is we're still operating with this constraint on the main part of our game so that we can build this and test it and see if it's fun right this
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constraint is in place to make us Focus so that we can make something fun and then expand it out later and add other sections or mini games or whatever but not make them something we concentrate on at the start I'm going to call this
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game idea the HMS indie game Clinic very very creative name for my ship and yeah you could see how this could make a sort of XCOM style or side view management game right like this kind of thing and and then what do
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we do on an island I don't know I guess we look for Treasure again trying to kind of rub the theme and the constraint together and and use that friction to come up with the game idea that is going
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to be executable so if I have a a map like this and I have Pirates running around on it players are playing as pirates what are they doing well I mean the classic pirate activity to do on an
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island is to bury or find treasure maybe it's some kind of triangulation game where I pick up Clues and it and they tell me well your treasure is somewhere north of the red thing and it's uh it's somewhere east of the or somewhere west
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of the blue thing and then you use those arrows to find something I don't know you could go more down the overcooked Roo where is it about picking things up and carrying them around right that that's again we we again after we've set
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the constraint we look at other games that have a similar constraint and then we can see what they do so if I'm doing a top down here okay maybe we can take some of the interactions from overcooked and it's like your character can pick up
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an item and hold it above their head but they can only ever carry one item and that's kind of sort of similar Behavior to Bomberman actually as well although Bomberman it's always your bombs so we could have a kind of treasure hunting
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game where you're running around the island digging stuff up and then maybe maybe taking it back to your ship and that could be a really interesting setup for a m for a for a multiplayer game right running around on the island and
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digging stuff up and trying to take it back to their ship and avoiding sort of Hazards and then you can maybe also like steal people's treasure off them if they hit a hazard and drop it on the floor
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right so that's kind of using some elements of overcooked because if you you've got the kind of single item inventory where you can carry something around and you can drop it and I could see that could be quite fun if you were
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sort of playing around on this island running around and then trying to find things and take them back to your ship but your the other player is trying to watch for when you get in trouble and come and steal your treasure off you
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right you can already see that at this stage I'm not really thinking about genre because I'm trying to let everything come out of the constraint and the theme right and then we dip into other games and sort of think well how
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how did they make how did they make running around on a single environment on one screen fun and and you start to kind of ask these questions now let's try and do a a different constraint so let's have uh no visible characters
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right and I'll put the theme away for now but no visible characters games that don't have any characters that you can see I mean all walking simulators fall in this category but you'd also include things like the uh tals principle which
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is like a puzzle game the thing is that this game actually has quite a lot of interesting story stuff in in it but it is not told through characters so remember that games have what storytellers is called narrative devices
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in right so ways of telling a story and some of those ways of telling a story involve a a 3D rendered character standing and talking to you right but that is an incredibly expensive way of telling a story and that is why we get
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walking simulators so games like gone home you know they don't have characters in them or they don't have visible characters in the environment who talk to you because they have been designed by constraints right they the developer has realized
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that oh actually we can create a story game that is just about learning about a character by being in their house and we're not going to put any physical models of people in this and then again we have a theme right the
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constraint this is the developer constraint of we can't or we don't want to animate people but we can do voice over work and we can write and we can do all these other ways of telling a story this is the player
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facing intriguing thing that makes use of the constraint to produce gone home so remember you can never just have this this is for you as a developer to ensure that you are able to make something that you can make to a high quality
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but it is not the thing that makes the game appealing right people who play Walking simulators play them because they like the mood of the game they like the environment they like the story that is being told they don't like them
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specifically because there are no characters in them no characters is a is a developer constraint that comes from the fact that you know animating characters and doing their voice over animations and everything is very very difficult and expensive
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but we couple that with a theme that is appealing to people you know in the case of gone home it's about learning about a normal person by exploring their house while no one is there right and that is
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an appealing theme that justifies the developer constraint you know we we get a similar thing in Talos principle sci-fi puzzle game it has the same constraint has gone home the appealing theme is uh it's like a posthuman world
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really right nothing in your game should obviously be like oh I did it that way because it's easy you can do things because they're easier for you and you should do things that are easier for you you should focus on things that you are
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good at that stands to reason and obviously you're going to do learning projects where you want to focus on things that you want to learn but it should never be obvious that you did something to make your own life easier
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you always need it to tie in with the stuff that makes the game appealing to a player right so so the developer constraint of not having any visible characters is very clearly justified by the theme of the game Pacific drive has
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the same thing no visible characters how is it justified in the world well it's a kind of stalker inspired Lial Zone the theme justifies the developer constraints and works very well with them it makes it creepier this game would not be improved by adding
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facially animated characters that come up and talk to you it would actually be lessened probably it would make it worse right mini Metro also has the no visible characters constraint but it has an appealing theme which is a a Transit simulation based on
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Transit maps right and the map thing is really more the the visual style of the game than the theme of the game but we already had this Association in our heads between this graphic design style and the theme of trains and transit
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systems right so again the theme of it being a game about drawing things on a map and a game about trains allows it to be a game that doesn't just have no visible characters but no nothing that looks realistic right it's like a
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diagram like could you make a game that looks like this but is actually about a fantasy world no it is the developer constraint working together with the theme and the theme of it being trains makes this very simple art style make
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sense because it is evoking signs and maps and everything that we associate with trains right we can even expand some of this thinking out to some of the games that have featured on this channel so right back in last summer I saw this
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game Pentium which is oh there I am so s Pokémon esque uh monster collection monster battling game and you know one of the problems for making this sort of game is people are always going to compare your game to Pokémon and want it
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to do everything to the same sort of size and scale that a Pokemon game would do it so you have your developer constraint of can't make 500 creatures right again there are ways of marrying that constraint with a theme that makes
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up for it the issue with making a Pokémon style character collection game is people expect 400 to 500 creatures I'll be but if you change the theme to uh collecting things from a very limited pool of stuff that players understand is
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limited like collecting dinosaurs for example if the theme is collecting dinosaurs people are less expectant of it being Pokémon and having four creatures if the theme is collecting Undead creatures because you're playing as a necromancer then again people
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expect that category to have less stuff in it it so you've got theme that is working with your constraint but if you're trying to make a kind of Pokémon style game and you have this constraint of not being able to produce that many
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creatures then you need to kind of make the theme work with that constraint and I think in the in the case of this game one of the things I sort of suggested was switching to a theme for the
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monsters so that it made sense why there were less monsters and then people will be more accepting of that limitation another game I looked at right at the start of this channnel Sphero here where you play as a ball and you know there's
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nothing wrong with a game where players play as a ball there have been a few games in this category that have been successful where players play as a go as a ball but they are they have a theme so
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if we compare this we've got Sphero where uh player character is a geometric shape right to a player this can look like a game where everything is built around this constraint right they wanted to make a platformer they didn't want to animate a
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character or they didn't have the skills to do that well so they made a game with a ball it just looks like a a limitation right it's all based around a limitation but we've got examples of games like
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Rock of Ages Katamari is arguably a game where you play as a ball as well and we've got x01 which is like a a beautiful kind of Science Fiction game where you are rolling a sort of egg-like object through space these are all games
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where you play as quite a simple geometric object but there is a theme an appealing theme that explains that constraint right so over here it's appealing theme and humor and you can see it's in the title Rock of Ages it's a kind of History
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joke uh that this has a historical theme you can see it's going to be a game about smashing things and being a ball it's all it's all there in the title and the hero image x01 the appealing theme is like sci-fi
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environments yeah and just kind of gliding through them in a in a nice in a nice way and all of these things help to justify the fact that the player character is only a geometric shape it's just a ball rolling around but the issue
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that I found with Sphero was that there wasn't any reason why the player is a ball and that means that players aren't going to be very forgiving of this when they see this and they see what looks like placeholder art they're going to
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say this is placeholder art this is a lazy developer why should I play this CU if you just have a little bit of fiction to explain why this limitation is in the game maybe it's a magical ball controlled by a wizard and you're the
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wizard and you're off screen or it's I don't know there's there's lots of ways you can justify being a ball in a game but you do have to justify it that is that is a big part of what makes games
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work is the theme that we give it you know but the point is really whenever you have a decision in your game that you've made based on a developer constraint like I can't animate characters so I made my characters into
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a geometric shape or I made game environments with no characters in like all of these examples whenever you have a limitation like that that's very sensible because that is you working efficiently with your skills and resources available but it doesn't
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justify itself the player still needs a an inworld reason why you have a game with no characters in it or why you have a game where the characters are bulls and so on it's not enough to just use
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your limitation and hope that people will be forgiving of it because you're a solo developer or whatever that is generally not how people play games or consume media they don't go to something of a low quality and say well actually
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this is fine because it was made by one person and I'll and I'll cut them some slack because they made it all on their own they go to some something because it's appealing to them and then if it's
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good and it was made by one person then they might be impressed by that fact after but they're not going to like cut you any slack as a solo developer just because they know you don't have resources available so think about these
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couplings of blue and green boxes where the blue is your developer constraints like what you can or can't do based on who's in your team and what skills you have and all this kind of stuff make smart decisions about what game to make
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based on your developer constraints and then make sure that the theming of your game and the constraints of your game go together so that this is justified by this and I think there is a a small Nuance here to be aware of is that the
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thing that justifies the limitation needs to be appealing it can't be a thing that's like buried away in the lore of the game right so if I say oh um why does the character only have one gun and the answer you give me is like some
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deep law thing that you don't find out into a way into the game or whatever that's not a good enough reason it needs to be a reason that you would see on the steam splash page right the character
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only has one gun because the gun is their arm and it's built into their body that's a reason that is kind of based in the fiction of the game's world but it's also cool it's cool that this character's arm is a gun and that sets
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up the expectation that you're not going to be picking up 20 different guns in this game because the gun is part of you but it does it through something that is appealing and cool right you know all of
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these examples are like that like the Pacific Drive example it is cool that you're on your own in this environment I don't think this this game wouldn't be better if it was like Far Cry and it had annoying NPCs wandering all over the
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place it would be worse so your your thematic justification for your constraints needs to be something that's like front of Mind something that you would Market the game around you know it's an abandoned home it's creepy to go
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around in cuz no no one is there that's part of the mood of the game it's not something we did did just because we had this constraint of not being able to animate characters it may be in reality
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but it doesn't work just having this constraint on its own isn't an appealing thing it's not going to make people play your game so work with your constraints and then justify them through your game's fiction and make sure that you
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have a reasonably scoped game because you've used these constraints and acknowledged them in the first place but you don't use as excuses to make an unappealing game and the only way to do that is to make sure that all of your
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constraints are sort of justified by the game in a way that doesn't feel like hand wavy or like making an excuse but actually ties into what's cool about the game i' I'd be interested to hear whether some of you have already worked
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this way before whether you've used this kind of methodology before it might be something you just subliminally do I think there are definitely people who TR try and do too much stuff who TR and make these very ambitious games with
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like I say maybe a story in when they don't have any proven storytelling skills or you know types of art that they're not very good at or whatever element of the game it is that is weak and then there are those of us who have
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sort of imposter syndrome and maybe limit ourselves too much to only doing under ambitious things it's a very difficult Balancing Act and I'd be interested to hear how you've used constraints in your own design process when you're making games and examples of
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other constraints so we talked about not including visible characters in your game and you know when I say no characters I don't necessarily mean the character doesn't exist in the world right like there are games like dredge or sunless sea which are very vehicle
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based games where there are characters that are referred to constantly but they are a portrait in the corner of the screen someone that pops up in dialogue or something like that and again that's an example of a game where that story
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layer of characters that interact with you and talk to you can be added in later on once you know that the core of your game works but even if your goal is ultimately still to make a very big game
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you should be aiming to make a small game first that proves the concept of like people find this fun you know I've said it time and time again on this channel that spending more time on your game doesn't always make it better
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putting more features into your game doesn't always make it better what makes a game better is is following an iterative process of making things testing them with an audience making them testing them with an audience and just just trying things out over and
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over again and the more of these initial constraints you give yourself the quicker you're likely to get to a point where you have tested an idea for a game people seem to like it people seem to want more of it and then you can start
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to think about how do I make this into a 10hour experience how do I make it into a 100 hour experience or whatever but until you're really at that point it's not worth sinking time into the additional content or adding a mini game
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or whatever it is you know I get sent so many games on this channel where there's just too much stuff being attempted at once and they needed to just try and do half as many things to a higher degree
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of quality again your your players will be the end judges of your game and if your game is doing lots of things poorly then why should they play it right and this is why I keep coming back to this
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idea of researching other games and basing um your games on games with similar constraints and to to kind of come back to the initial question of the video I talked about why you should make smaller games but I also tried to talk
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about why it's so hard to why why are people so resistant to this idea even if they know it's the Practical thing to do one reason is that you just don't play enough small games we're so spoiled by
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every game even like you know indie games at the moment just being very polished and very full of stuff that a lot of people just aren't exposed to enough small games to have anything to compare to so you know they don't have
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an experience of playing a down well or or a Bomberman or or whatever that lack of exposure to small games means that you're only points of reference and your only inspiration are games that are made by Massive teams that you couldn't
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possibly make something of that quality I think this method that I've showed you today should help you with that because by sort of starting with a constraint or starting with one or more constraints like saying I'm not going to do a story
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because I can't do that yet and I don't have skills in that and I'd need someone else to help me if I wanted to do that really well setting some other constraints like having no characters or making the game take place in a single
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screen or even just you know only making one level right if you're making an action game just only commit to making a single level game and don't make any more of it until people are excited and and want to see more of that game right
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that should be your proof of it's time to continue this project it's time to make it bigger but you should never kind of set out to spend three years on a game until you've made a prototype that people are excited about and want to
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play I do think YouTube is a particularly bad environment for this because there are so many developers on here making logs of their games where they seem to be working on the same game and polishing it for months and months
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and months and years and years and years no evidence of any play testing right it's just a feedback loop of people from YouTube saying oh your game looks nice and it's just like visually it looks nice and that's not how you tell
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something's going to be fun the thing I'm trying to encourage you to do here is to bring down the scope of your ideas so that you can create things to test whether something is fun and appealing and only once you've made something and
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tested whether it's fun or appealing and you've got like a decent response from people then you can start thinking about how to make that smaller game into either a very polished small game right uh a game that only has a few levels but
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it's re it's a really high level of quality this is your kind of mini metros uh games like ape out these are these are all still relatively small games but they're very very polished or then you can start thinking about how you expand
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that out into a very long game with a story or a very big game with lots of areas to explore but you should never really be aiming to make that big long game until you know that you've got a a
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compelling short game and one of the saddest things I see on this channel when people send me their games they just these games that are intended to be big long RPG experiences and there's so much like broken or just uninteresting
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stuff in the core gameplay that I just think why did you spend this much time on this and and it fundamentally comes back to the idea that game design is not necessarily game development they are slightly different things and you can be
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developing a game for a very long time I.E opening up a game engine deciding what to do doing some programming adding some art that's all game development and you can be developing a game for a very long time and never really designing it
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because you're not thinking about the end user or you're making lots of assumptions about the end user or as is is more often the case you're just never involving them at all you're you're never testing things with people or the
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classic one is only testing things with audiences who want you to feel good so they tell you stuff is good when it's not one of the best things you can do for yourself as any kind of creative whether it's a game developer or writer
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or musician is to find people that have the same kind of standards as you and I want you to improve and will tell you when something sucks a little bit the situation you never want to be in is
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working on something for a long period of time and tweaking it and tweaking it and tweaking it and never letting anyone play it because they are your quickest shortcut to understanding whether people are going to like this game further down
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the line and if what you've made is not fundamentally exciting to people and they you don't get people in the state where they're like no I want to carry on playing give me one more go then your dream of making a bigger game needs to
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wait for a while until you can make a good small game so the the small games versus big games question is really a matter of quality if you want to do anything to a high degree of quality you
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have to be able to execute the fundamentals of that thing very well games can be very repetitive a lot of games ask us to do the same thing over and over again and if your game doesn't have like a fun five minutes in it where
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people really enjoy doing that five minutes of stuff then it doesn't need to be an hour it doesn't need to be 10 hours until you've got to a point where where where that moment to moment is fun hopefully what I've shown you today
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gives you something that can help you to iterate Faster come up with better ideas you know a sensible game developer who wants to make things they can actually finish is going to think about these developer constraints and base their
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ideas around this you know what can I and can't I do and how should I limit my Project based on that but in order to take that and make it into something appealing you need to marry these things
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together and make sure that the developer constraints make sense with the theme of the game and and still allow the game to be exciting or appealing in some way thank you for watching as is always the case these videos are me thinking
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out loud about the game design process and giving suggestions of things that may work for you some of this stuff may just not be relevant to you you may have found other ways of doing some of this stuff that just work better a few and
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that's totally fine uh if you disagree with anything I've said feel free to leave a comment but I I I work on the assumption that you're all adults and you can take or leave suggestions as they come to
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you and if you don't find a suggestion useful you can just move on rather than going ah you're misleading people with these lies as always thanks to my patrons both the people that subscribe on patreon and our YouTube channel channel members you
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are the people who currently make this channel possible doing this kind of more intermediate to Master's level game design Theory stuff on YouTube it's not great algorithm bait that the kids don't like this stuff so this channel is never
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going to make enough kind of AdSense revenue for me to be able to live on so the monthly income we get from our patrons is really really helpful allows me to keep producing stuff like this so thank you very much for those who've
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signed up already that's also currently supporting the series Indies under the knife where I review games sent to me and give them design feedback we currently release one of those a week every Thursday I've set a community funding goal that when our Patron
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reaches £1,000 a month we're going to go up to two of those a week so if you like Indies under the knife and you want to see more kind of feedback given to new developers on their games then go and
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support the patreon if you can when we hit that Community funding goal we're going to get twice as much of Indies under the knife and that will allow me to get through my backlog of games to review which is constantly expanding at
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an alarming rate so thank you to everyone who's already supporting the channel I appreciate you a lot and if you're if you're new and this is the first video you've watched please Boop the like button and subscribe and I will
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be back again in your feed at some point [Music] h [Music]
Topics:game designsmall gamesdesign constraintsindie game developmentscope managementgame jamMini MetroDownwellgame prototypingpolish
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