Don’t Fight Your Tools! Light-Bulb Moments in Game Dev

Flyover Indies Podcast: Game Making in Kansas City

Making games is hard. Hard things require motivation to, over time, sand to smooth easiness. That sanding journey is often landmarked by epiphanies, sudden moments of enlightenment, and general ah ha moments. These are what we talk about on this episode of The Flyover Indies Podcast.

Stick around through the end to hear the latest round of the on-going trivia game in which the host, Caleb, competes against the co-hosts for world trivia domination. The score is currently: Players 2, Caleb 0. Will Caleb get his first point? Or will the co-hosts continue to dominate?

Listen in as we talk about our game development “ah ha” moments, including:

• The importance of commenting even as a solo dev
• Self-documenting/readable code
• The importance of having fun as part of the learning & development process
• Shaders are black magic
• Unity events are suuuuper useful
• The absolute need to LEARN THE TOOLS YOU USE and…
• DO NOT FIGHT those tools your learned to use (even if fighting the tools feels like a “neat old’ fashioned way to do it,” as Jo so eloquently states)

Stick around through the end for the next round in our ongoing trivia game. The score is Players 2, Host 0. It seems we need to get at some harder questions in the rotation. Will the players continue their winning streak, or will the host play hardball?

The games we mentioned are:

• Beast Breaker
• Kirby’s Dream Course
• Yoku’s Island Express
• Age of Empires 4
• Manifold Garden
• Tracer (Charlotte’s game). Play it here: https://espiongames.itch.io/tracer

The game-making lessons we mentioned are:

• When genre-blending, a game must be willing to bend the conventions of a genre in order to make the game more fun (Beast Breaker)
• The player must know why they’ve been punished (Age of Empires 4)
• The very first problem that the player needs to solve is critically important. The player’s mental model will wrap around that first problem, and adapting differently will be difficult (Manifold Garden)

The mentioners of the aforementioned mentionables are:

• Charlotte Trible (@ctrble) - co-founder of Flyover Indies and game developer
• Jo Hanna (https://www.jovideogameshanna.com) - co-founder of Flyover Indies and game developer
• Caleb J Ross (@calebjross / https://calebjross.com) - member of Flyover Indies and game developer

Play some of our games here: https://itch.io/games/tag-flyover-indies

Credits

• Intro and outro music by Nash (https://www.nashhigh.com)