{"id":1089,"date":"2015-07-23T12:43:42","date_gmt":"2015-07-23T12:43:42","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/theindiestone.com\/binky\/?p=1089"},"modified":"2015-07-23T13:04:50","modified_gmt":"2015-07-23T13:04:50","slug":"just-make-a-good-game","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/theindiestone.com\/binky\/2015\/07\/23\/just-make-a-good-game\/","title":{"rendered":"&#8220;Just make a good game!&#8221;"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Okay, so I&#8217;ve just watched an excellent YouTube video from Simon Roth, the chap behind Maia, about how to build a sustainable microstudio (a re-creation of his Develop talk). I&#8217;ll include it below because I really recommend giving it a watch:<\/p>\n<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" width=\"560\" height=\"315\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/1BCg31KVJok\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p>But one thing stood out to me, very very early on, in the video which is where he&#8217;s critical of &#8220;useless&#8221; advice for indie devs &#8211; one of these nuggets of useless advice was, &#8220;just make a good game&#8221;.<\/p>\n<p>Oh my God. That&#8217;s me, I do that <em>all the time<\/em>, it&#8217;s pretty much the <em>only<\/em> piece of advice I ever give! I&#8217;m going to defend it.<\/p>\n<p>Now, I appreciate that it&#8217;s fairly useless in the sense that &#8220;good&#8221; doesn&#8217;t really mean anything concrete. Good how? Mechanically robust? Following established conventions of game design? Being in a popular genre? It certainly poses more questions than it answers, and it actually answers very little. But when I give that piece of advice to people, I&#8217;m not giving them advice which is a surefire way to success (nobody can do that) &#8211; instead I&#8217;m recommending a mindset.<\/p>\n<p>As Simon points out (paraphrasing here), &#8220;Lots of crap games sell loads, lots of good games fail miserably &#8211; so how &#8216;good&#8217; something is does not necessarily correlate to how well something sells&#8221;. This is perfectly true but from my point of view, I would not want to be a developer who writes crap games which sell such that I am now running a &#8220;successful&#8221; games studio. I want to be a developer of great games. If sales did not follow, then I would be a hobbiest developer of great games &#8211; if they did, I would be running a &#8220;successful&#8221; games studio who makes great games. I&#8217;m not interested in the &#8220;successful&#8221; bit <em>unless<\/em> that was just something which happened on account of the games I made being well regarded.<\/p>\n<p>The games come first.<\/p>\n<p>If you&#8217;re starting out and compiling advice about how to become successful and at no point is the top bullet point of your list of &#8220;do&#8217;s&#8221; a big bold, underlined, &#8220;come up with a great game idea, then try to execute it competently&#8221; &#8211; if success is more important to you than the game &#8211; then what the Hell are you doing in the games industry? Frankly, you can piss off \ud83d\ude09<\/p>\n<p><strong>Note in case it isn&#8217;t clear:<\/strong> I very much like Simon Roth, his hair, and <a href=\"http:\/\/store.steampowered.com\/app\/252250\/\" target=\"_blank\">Maia<\/a>. This isn&#8217;t intended to be critical of him or his talk. I just disagree with that one little nugget of that one slide.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Okay, so I&#8217;ve just watched an excellent YouTube video from Simon Roth, the chap behind Maia, about how to build a sustainable microstudio (a re-creation of his Develop talk). I&#8217;ll include it below because I really recommend giving it a watch: But one thing stood out to me, very very early on, in the video&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[15,12],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1089","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-rants","category-useless-advice"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p326tq-hz","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/theindiestone.com\/binky\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1089","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/theindiestone.com\/binky\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/theindiestone.com\/binky\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theindiestone.com\/binky\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theindiestone.com\/binky\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1089"}],"version-history":[{"count":11,"href":"https:\/\/theindiestone.com\/binky\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1089\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1100,"href":"https:\/\/theindiestone.com\/binky\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1089\/revisions\/1100"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/theindiestone.com\/binky\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1089"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theindiestone.com\/binky\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1089"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theindiestone.com\/binky\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1089"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}