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75 Lessons Learned from Live Game Development

In the course of making games for over 20 million players—based on popular IP like Game of Thrones and Star Trek—I learned a lot of lessons. This is just a few of them, although this includes some of the most painfully learned lessons.

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BIG PRINCIPLES

  • Every "rule" in gamedev has a great exception
  • You probably won't be the exception
  • Hard: Shipping; Harder: Shipping fun game; Hardest: shipping fun that scales.
  • Shots on goal (trying ideas, shipping, iterating) matters most

PHASES OF PRODUCT

  • You can only build 1 game vision; converge team & purge fiefdoms
  • 0 to 1 is about shared vision h/t @chrisheatherly
  • Data is everything in the Live Ops stage; velocity of insight -> product improvement is predictor of success h/t @albertsupdates

PEOPLE

  • Be wary of hiring people who harbor deep reservations about making money
  • Be very afraid if the team building the game isn’t playing it
  • Toxic / abusive team members suck
  • Cynical team members suck

HIRING

  • Many people will say nearly anything to land a job at a game studio
  • Hire optimistic people because game development is incredibly hard
  • Work with people who want to make a great game right now more than anything else in their life

TEAM MIX

  • Great teams with experienced craftspeople are foundational
  • Adding fresh blood who need to learn/prove (e.g., interns) has a high ROI and better connects you to current culture
  • Live Ops teams who run great games are usually not right to build a NEW game

FEATURES

  • Smaller is almost always better than larger
  • But “large enough” is even more important
  • Replayability is gold
  • It is better to cut mediocre features

MARKETING

  • For mobile games: what Kotaku says doesn’t matter
  • Meta critic score is one of the worst-designed metrics that exist
  • App store featuring will not save you
  • The sins of design will not be countered by marketing spend

TOOLING & TECH

Tools need to be native to the user (Unity for programmers, spreadsheets for designers, website forms for PMs, etc.)

  • Manual processes suck
  • Don’t build backend yourself
  • Don’t build a 3d engine
  • Technology prowess doesn’t win

PRODUCTION

  • Games look like a mess until at least 90% done
  • People think they are close to 90% when it's actually more like 50%
  • It will take longer than you think

MORE ON VISION

  • Reiteration of the Vision is a constant effort; don't take for granted
  • Create the simple definition of what’s important

ITEMIZATION & ECONOMY

  • Good shop design is critical—needs as much attention as any other part of the game
  • Getting a rare item should be clear and awesome for the player
  • Don't cap the size of your economy / monetization
  • Pay attention to what people buy

UX

  • Show your game to people IN PERSON, and take lots of notes on what happens when they play
  • Pay attention to how performance scales as the size of data (inventories, etc.) grows

INNOVATION

  • Innovation is good for capturing new markets, attention to craft craft is good for capturing established ones
  • UX is often the difference between good and great
  • You can’t really “lean startup” a game because too much of it is based on a complete experience

NARRATIVE

  • Storytelling on mobile must connect with the audience within seconds
  • Narrative != Dialog
  • Narrative is represented through game systems
  • Humans find meaning through story

DATA

  • Instrument everything, you’ll probably want the data at some point
  • Make it easy to access data
  • Dashboards that don’t display actionable intelligence might be cool but aren’t useful

PLAYERS

  • Love your players. (Contempt for players is doom)
  • Players will speed run content faster than you expect
  • Your most valuable cohort will probably be the people who show up in the beginning.
  • Optimize single player experience before multi

DON'T PANIC

  • Don’t panic if things look like a mess for the first 80% of the development timeline
  • Panic if things look like a mess when you’re about to ship :)

CURIOSITY

  • Team members should be really curious about what successful games like yours have done before
  • Pay close attention If people on the team are experts on your target audience, and they don’t like the game

MORE ON PLAYERS

  • Your most vocal players are good to listen to, but be careful because they’re not necessarily representative of your market
  • Even bad games have their fans

CURIOSITY

  • Team should be really curious about what successful games like yours have done before
  • Pay attention if people on the team are experts on your target audience, and they don’t like the game
  • Be wary of know-it-alls.. unless they've shipped top-revenue games🙂

MORE ON PLAYERS

  • Your most vocal players are good to listen to, but be careful because they’re not necessarily representative of your market
  • Even bad games have their fans

VELOCITY

  • Any feature that depends on more than 1 programmer will be exponentially harder and riskier to implement
  • The best features can usually be prototyped in days if not hours
  • Code in the fewest languages possible, ideally just one

LICENSES

  • Aligning incentives is critical
  • Licenses can break through noise when nobody else does it; when everyone does it, worse
  • Avoid over-licensed IP
  • The IP biz dev person’s incentive is usually short-term (annual bonus) your incentives are long term (decade+)

MONEY

  • Debt for UA is like taking treasure from a pit of vipers — more ways to die than win
  • Biz models that work in largest games may not work to scale your much-smaller game
  • Be wary of backers long on money and short on gamedev experience
  • Your forecast will be wrong

SHIPPING

  • It is better to delay than ship before it is ready
  • But it is better to ship before you run out of money than not ship at all
  • If you can’t ship before running out of money, the culprit is probably that your scope was too great—not that the capital was too small

FINAL THOUGHTS

  • If some stuff on this is contradictory, that’s OK. Games contain multitudes.
  • If you haven’t failed in game dev you haven’t been at it long enough
  • When someone declares the future of games, it usually isn’t
  • Fear is the Mind Killer
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