Great Game Designers: It’s All About Routines!

What makes a good Game Designer? A big part of it is build around a simple thing: Routines. 💪

Overall I have worked with tens of Game Designers throughout my career so far and can nowadays identify best ones quite easily. How? Seeing their routines through, which will reveal how they think, approach design and overall tackle challenges from a larger picture on top of other important factors. 💯👍

Why routines? They make one always go through different questions and details, which formalizes to proper game design that really have been thought and walked through by looking into all necessary details. When used properly, even someone who would have not been a Game Designer previously, but have been in games in another role, can produce an ok outcome just by following routines through that e.g., higher positioned Game Designers follow through normally. 🫡

The biggest mistakes in Game Design comes usually by skipping routines where someone falls in love with ideas and go with them – where the outcome very usually leads to making choices that add debt and perform poorly. Why? Because, routines makes you simply tackle all angles when approaching game design – and by skipping, at one point rug will get pulled below. Of course, one can be lucky with skipping routines and finding ‘a hit’, but overall all those lucky cases face issues that are most often solved just by following proper routines – or when they are not solved the party stops at one point where the lucky case won’t be sustained for long term. 💯🚀

Will routines lead to success? No. Success isn’t guaranteed even by them in this industry. Ultimately this is where things need to be approached with iterative means – whilst one need to still understand that even great things might not taste enough for players to have a sustainable business case. But, good routines most definitely will increase chances compared to shooting blanks blindly. 👌

Happy to hear if folks here agree or disagree (and reveal are they bad ones / have worked with bad ones 😉). 😁