How to Make Good Small Games: Further Reading

Here's a little follow-up to my big manifesto blog post! I wanted to link some pieces I really like on similar topics.

escaping the walled garden of games
toby alden

Corporations have a vested interest in limiting your imagination, in making you think the only games out there are the ones they spend millions of dollars to shove in your face. The only way to combat this is to break out of their walled gardens. Download games off alternative sites; itch.io is one of the big ones. Figure out how to run them even when your OS tells you "meep, I don't recognize this publisher, I'm scared..." Steal and emulate old games you can't buy anymore. Steal new ones too if you want -- I won't tell. If you cultivate broader tastes in games by sampling a wider variety of work, you'll be much more prepared to make games of your own.

I also loved Toby’s gamedev manifesto blog post – points 4 and 6 especially gave me pause and got me thinking about my own work and style.
 
On Long Game Dev
NARFNra

Really useful thoughts on "long game dev" from Narf. Our main cultural benchmarks for indie successes are massive mega-projects like Iconoclasts or Axiom Verge, games that took over their creators' lives for half a decade or more. This isn't great! There are lots of other ways to makes games that are healthier and happier. If you want to spend a decade on a mega-project, no one's stopping you. But it's worth understanding the cost, and that there are different ways of doing things.

making your own engine: a survey of the landscape
prophet goddess

This piece really challenged me when I first read it. I adore high-level game making tools like Bitsy, Twine, RPGMaker, Puzzlescript. This piece doesn't even see these kinds of tools as worth mentioning. It's a completely different world from mine, and my first reaction was to get kinda pissy.

But I think this piece exists on a similar axis to the others I’m linking here -- it's ultimately about seizing control of your own creativity from corporations. Unity, YoYoGames, Epic Games all want you to think you need their big bloated expensive tools to tell your stories. But you don't. If high-level tools like Bitsy, etc. don't speak to you, if you need precise control over your engine, it's worth looking into lightweight frameworks as an alternative to the bigger corporate tools. I've gotten a lot of joy this past year out of building my own game engines in Love2D. It was this piece that made me think frameworks like this could work for me.

I still think high-level tools are great, and that most beginner devs would be better served trying one of those than trying to program their own engine. Finishing a game is its own skill, and trying to pick up a bunch of programming stuff on top of that is gonna make the process of learning much scarier. But if you already feel comfortable in an IDE, and the idea of making your own engine excites you, this piece gives you a lot of good places to start.

Divest from the Video Games Industry!
Marina Kittaka

This piece from Marina Kittaka has been bouncing around my head since she posted it years ago. The games industry as it exists now is rotten; it's stuffed full of abusive power structures and it's poisoning the earth. Abuse, exploitation, bigotry, and e-waste are endemic at every level of games, from massive AAA studios to indie publishers to hobbyist communities.

Marina talks about alternative ways of making games that help avoid feeding these machines. It's all resonant and pointed. I particularly connected with the "Divest from celebrity/authority" paragraph. I've never been part of the "games industry" proper. But I have hero-worshipped hobbyist game dev "celebrities" and invested myself in the communities they fostered around themselves. A lot of these people turned out to be creeps, assholes, predators. I don't want to be part of an art community that orbits around a central heroic leader on a pedestal. It takes a certain kind of unsavory personality to cultivate that kind of dynamic, and it breaks bad more often than not.

I'm not interested in being part of the games industry, in "changing things from the inside". But it's important to be politically aware, to understand the ways the industry sucks ass. That way we can strive to avoid replicating its problems in our own communities.

Unprofessional Game Criticism
Easy Game Development
LeeRoy Lewin

Like Marina, LeeRoy is really good at communicating the underlying politics of game dev. Every resource out there on making games (or writing about games) is informed by the author's relationship with games industry capital. If someone's main goals in games are to Make Money and Get Famous, that's going to inform everything they say about making games. Any attempt to divest ourselves from the problems of the games industry is going to be inherently leftist, because the problems of the games industry are really the problems of capitalism. LeeRoy is much more well-read and better at talking about this stuff than I am, so give these essays a read!

Indie Game Dev: Death Loops
Derek Yu

Yu comes from the perspective of a commercial dev, so his advice isn’t always useful to me. But I’ve come back to this piece over and over. I think it perfectly articulates a lot of traps devs fall into, and is mandatory reading for anyone who’s felt stuck starting and restarting huge dream projects.

good writers are perverts
DOMINO CLUB

As Toby put it, “embrace your freak energy.” I like small games in part because I feel way closer to their authors than I do playing big studio games. Hobbyist games are full of weird personal idiosyncrasies and it brings me an endless amount of joy. I learned a lot about queerness for the first time from hobbyist games; they helped me find my identity when I was younger.

Please be yourself as much as possible while making art. Especially when that means being weird, horny, queer, a pervert, a freak. I guarantee there are folks who’ll connect with your perspective.