If you happen to stumble across these posts, I hope they inspire you in some way, whether you’re just starting out or somewhere along your own path in game development.

These might sound mouthful, like Zote’s 57 percepts, but I like the irony of reading my past self trying to teach a lesson to my future self. So here goes nothing:

Embrace Mount Stupid

There’s no denying that I too fell victim to the climb up Mount Stupid.

From the foot of it, the peak is right on sight. As soon as I finished my first tutorial, I felt unstoppable. My confidence was at an all time high, and my dream game felt just around the corner.

Needless to say, that wasn’t the case. But I will admit: my naivety gave me the boost I needed to get started. If you don’t dare, you don’t succeed, and I only dared because I was at the peak of Mount Stupid. I started looking right away at procedural terrain generation to make a giant open world game and told myself that even if I failed, I could always sell the terrible 3D models I’d made in Blender with just weeks of experience.

To be honest, falling from the peak wasn’t the harsh reality check that people often make it out to be, but rather an eye-opening landing that made me discover how much there really is to learn.

Design is everywhere

Having a background in computer science, I’ve always felt more comfortable solving technical challenges than design ones.

I love it when I’m told what to do and just need to do it. But unfortunately, in games, figuring out what to do is often a much greater challenge, at least for me.

While playing games, design is often overlooked. If you don’t notice it, it usually means the designers did a good job making their decisions feel natural, intuitive, and invisible.

Every decision is deliberate: Where should the camera point after a cutscene? Should jumping cancel an attack? What happens if the player does something before something else? And to all these questions, there’s rarely a right answer.

I remember that back in school, the subjects I excelled at were the ones with clear right and wrong answers. In math, if you solved every question correctly, you got full marks, simple. But in an essay? Full marks always felt out of reach. There was no perfect answer, only better ways of expressing an idea, and that ambiguity is what designers deal with all the time.

Design is not only about mechanics, that only covers game design. There’s level design, sound design, narrative design, UX design, economy design, cinematic design… the list goes on. Practically everything in a game is touched by design in some form, and these fields are so different from one another, so… how does a person even make a game?

This leads to my next point:

Pick your battles

Game developers can’t master every aspect of making games, but they can excel in a few key areas that make all the difference. Some games are celebrated for their mechanics, others for their stories, and others still for their aesthetics.

As developers, we tend to gravitate toward certain parts of game creation. Those become our battles to pick. And losing ground in one area can often be balanced by winning in another.

For example, bold and extreme stylization might be a clever shortcut for a developer who lacks traditional artistic skills but can also become a defining signature for the game’s look and feel.

Solo developers have to wear a lot of hats, but some hats will fit you better than others, and that’s okay.

Sometimes Good Enough Is Good Enough

Have you ever sat down after a long day, food in hand, ready to watch something and unwind, only to spend twenty minutes scrolling through Netflix trying to find the perfect show? By the time you finally settle on something, your dinner is cold or already finished, and now it feels too late to even start. You sit there wondering why you didn’t just pick anything right away, because honestly, almost anything would have done the trick. Somehow, doing nothing feels worse than watching something that’s just okay. Couldn’t be me… But this can happen while making games too.

Striving for perfection is only natural, but as the saying goes, “perfect is the enemy of good.” Sometimes, a feature just needs to be functional, good enough to do the job. Trying to make every system flawless can lead to endless tweaks, lost time, and worst of all, a game that never gets finished. Chasing perfection can feel productive, but in reality, it often delays progress and prevents you from shipping something that people can actually play.

Learn to fail fast

Pretty self-explanatory: learning is a tedious and time-consuming feat, but learning by making is usually the fastest way to improve. Just don’t get too attached to your initial projects when you’re starting out, because you’ll discover better ways of doing things almost every day. You might feel tempted to rewrite your entire codebase every few weeks, but a better approach is to fail fast, let go, and start fresh on a new project armed with your newfound knowledge.

It’s not just about making games, it’s about people

Sometimes, you have to choose between the game and the people who make it, between creating a great game and keeping your team happy. Everyone has different opinions on what makes a game great, and trying to satisfy them all often leads to a game that pleases no one. Sometimes, you have to let go of your vision of the perfect game to make people happy. After all, games are made by people.

This is especially true in game jams, where everyone’s vision often doesn’t align, and with no clear hierarchy, decision-making can become a delicate balancing act since everyone is on equal footing.

But don’t get me wrong: mixing and matching ideas can lead to great ideas too. When diverse perspectives come together, that’s when unexpected and creative ideas have the highest chance to emerge!