The Key to Building Great Games

The most important part in games production, on a quest to build a successful game, is getting iterative development right – yet, most don’t get it right nor don’t even know how to approach it right.

Where someone approaches games production or project management through regular agile, lean, etc. methodologies, the biggest trap one falls is just following up processes & frameworks – and believing things will work out. I mean, it’s fine, but as an outcome you end up shipping less greatness & mediocre games.

How one can achieve more? The biggest truth is in the ‘iterative’ approach. And, specifically, in terms of iterative development, it’s not really about processes nor frameworks — it’s all about: Mindset; mindset of team, leads, etc. as well as stakeholders involved in. This is the key to crack it right in the first place.

Where the mindset is set right; next it’s about what makes a game fun and/or is the core of it. Once that is 100% clear, you would need, with your mindset, approach building that in the first place and iterating on it to make it right – or end up killing it, if you don’t crack it. It might be even that you’ll even discover what’s fun & core of your game after several iterations. Once found & validated, this is really a point where you build other layers on top of it – from core loop to meta game, etc.; while repeating iterations for improvements and retaining your fun/core.

When you build & iterate the right way, with like-minded mindsets around it, ultimately this is what makes game-making fun (and great teams!) – working on a project / team that is working over something that has greatness in them. Of course, doesn’t guarantee success, but this will make you develop better games & teams – especially when you can combine proper Leadership, Product, Market Research, CI, Business, Marketability and Commercialization practices on top.

To summarize — set your mindset right for iterative development, find fun/core, build & iterate on top of the fun/core, and make game-making fun through it. Everyone telling something else – they lack of maturity & understanding what it really means on building greatness (of course, I’m happy to be challenged on this).

This is not ‘straight-forward’. Like, it requires lots of trust, flexibility, etc. at all ends – incl. management, stakeholders, etc. The more complex managing it right it becomes, the bigger the company or e.g., corporation is where you are. This is where folks who have mastered the act shine, whilst others tend to still make mistakes in managing it so that as an outcome you risk shipping less quality. It’s definitely not easy, but it’s doable if you also properly manage all these relationships properly & coach everyone on it.