Young Videogame Developer’s Journal

After Writing This Book

In 2007, I started work full-time at Electronic Arts as a Technical Game Designer. In 2008, I was among the first hires at start-up that a few years later became PopCap San Francisco. I did my first freelance game contract development that year, one of which involved leading development on what became a top-selling iPhone game. Over the next few years, I made games reaching millions of players, had my work showcased in museums, and spent a summer prototyping for Will Wright.

I didn't have much audience before those things happened. But none of those could have happened if I hadn't spent the ten years prior consistently making freeware games for practice, averaging several releases each year.

All but a few of my freeware projects were, still are, and probably always should be, largely unknown. In a few cases, freeware games I worked on reached tens or hundreds of thousands of players. In most cases, a few dozen people ever saw or tried it, if that.

The reason for that obscurity was not a problem of discovery, lack of press contacts, or need for recognition of influencers. My projects were beginner-level. I had a lot of errors and untested ideas to get out of my system, and to the other side of. 

In the time since, my professional focus has shifted full-time to helping other people on their own journeys. I advise and support new developers so they can cover, far better and with much less stress or uncertainty, in mere months stages and milestones that took me years to work through on my own. Part of doing this work involves being upfront about what my projects looked and played like when I was starting out, too. That provides a more realistic and actionable baseline for comparison of beginner work.

What's Covered in This eBook: 1996-2007

This PDF game design book covers the ten years of 40+ freeware game projects that led to several major turning points in my career. It's a snapshot of how game development was different from 1996-2007—before the rush of commercial indies, app stores, game jams, and powerful free tools like Unity—as well as my version of a journey that countless developers starting today are now going through in discovering their (or your!) pathway into a lifetime of making games.

Since nearly all of these were made as freeware, part-time tinkering outside of being a full-time student, either alone or with peer hobbyist collaborators, these can also work as a convenient catalog for many examples of games that could make for suitable project targets try out some variation of when getting started.

I began, as I encourage other developers to, by remaking simpler classics. I gradually mixed in more original features, but even as I pivoted into more original projects I kept the practice separate from complications of marketing or monetization. The work was driven purely by whatever I (and, when with a team, we) wanted to play, or wanted to learn next.

I prepared this PDF in 2007. Its contents are untouched by either hindsight or any revisions based on events that have happened in my career or the industry since. I simply wanted to document what I learned from my first decade, to help new developers get a sense for the kind of learning that comes up along the way. Each page has a release date and screenshot to provide context, clarification about my involvement with that project, a description, development time, and most importantly, several Key Takeaways that reflect design, programming, and other considerations I kept going forward to future projects.

Some Key Takeaways are personal. Some are genre-specific. Some seem obvious, or naive, in hindsight. Others, however, became pillars of my professional design, development, and teaching work ever since. These represent highlights from ten years of learning by doing, for dozens of games across a range of contexts, platforms, and styles.

Real Background Work

It's natural for beginners to see successful indie game developers, and then aim to emulate what they do. But to focus on Fall Guys is to miss the 115+ games that studio made since 2005. Rovio made more than 50 games before Angry Birds. Although people didn't know who Notch was until Minecraft, he was making games since he was eight years old. Super Meat Boy's Tommy Refenes put 18 years into game development before Super Meat Boy's success.

The famous hits are, in all but a rounding error of cases, the tip of the iceberg from a far longer, and initially much grand or impressive, history of lower visibility practice and momentum building.

The biggest ingredient to success isn't having a right idea, a formulaic process, or a key lesson advocated from a conference stage as if it's a silver bullet. It comes from doing the work to the best of our abilities, and doing so again and again, learning as we go in smaller bits and pieces, until the patterns we need emerge. I wrote this book to share some of the bits and pieces I found. This story includes what I learned by making bad projects, too, that no one noticed or played. The collection represents a larger message: don't give up, don't get jaded, don't get impatient, don't stop creating, don't stop learning, and keep expanding the limits of your ability, regardless of who is or is not paying attention to it yet.

Some companies and individuals bury their past work, to strengthen brand value or benefit from how well stories that sound like overnight success get clicks. I don't hide my past because my mission is to help more people making games. The only way people can possibly get on board for the long-term is to be upfront about what it involves.

Here's a cross section of what one person's backstory looks like. With this is the chance to learn from some of my mistakes and early hints of success. I want you to be able to build upon, watch for, test for yourself, or perhaps prove wrong the lessons I shared here. My hope is that you'll be able to do so after browsing this overview leads to asking better questions than I could see at the time.