One of my secret passions is game design. I love watching YouTube videos about how games are made and why game developers made the decisions that they did. The topic for this episode was inspired by 2 YouTube channels that explain video game design really well. One is Adam Millard, who has the Architect of Games YouTube Channel. The other is Mark Brown, who has Game Makers Toolkit YouTube Channel. Even if you’re not designing a video game yourself, there’s a lot you can learn from how they’re designed. There are a lot of parallels between what game designers go through and what creatives in other fields deal with. If you’re interested, I’ll leave links to their channels in the description. It’s fascinating when it all comes together to form an amazing video game, but it’s also fascinating when a game collapses under its own weight. 

Video game design is incredibly competitive. It’s a high-risk, high-reward industry. As we talked about on the episode about hyper-segmentation (EP 10-11?), when there’s tons of competition, businesses tend to respond by trying to add more and more on top of their base offering. They tell themselves “I can’t simply give you X… I need to give you X, Y, & Z.”

In game design, these additions come in the form of game mechanics. There are skill trees that give you special moves. There’s crafting, like in Minecraft, where you can combine items together to create new items. These are often so complex that you need to download an online PDF just to remember all the combinations. Games are super-complex. 

That’s why simple games are so fascinating. Take the breakout game Hollow Knight, which has sold nearly 3 million copies and spawned an entire franchise of sequels. What can you do in this game? You can jump, slash enemies with a sword, and bounce on enemies like Mario. That’s it. 

Let’s take another incredibly simple and popular game: 5 Nights At Freddy’s, likely one of the scariest, creepiest games out there. You play as a security officer. What can you do in the game? You can look at your security cameras and there are 2 doors that you can open or close. That’s it. Even more impressive is that there are almost no need for graphics in the game. When something moves, it moves while you’re not looking at it. So not only does the game create a creepy feeling that something is wrong, but it saves money on all the programming and graphics. 

Both of these games are incredibly simple. Anyone can pick them up and within the first few minutes have a complete understanding of all the mechanics. Their simplicity makes them easy to the company to create and for the player to enjoy. 

As you create today, try to simply your product. Instead of trying to add more bells and whistles to what you’re doing, focus on creating your masterpiece around 1-2 very simple ideas. Figure out how to pull the maximum value out of what you already have instead of adding more to it. This has the double-satisfaction of doing less, better. 

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