Hello everyone! I recently wrote up a Medium article on my experiences as a Game Designer, specifically how Game Designers can hurt their game through their own biases. As nobody wants to read a “doom and gloom” article about why your profession is much harder than you thought, the article then transitions over to how you can help your game through Game Analytics.
As a bonus in the article, I’ve included links to a few tools I’ve developed to help with Game Analytics, with the most useful being a spreadsheet that can predict game performance before you even release the game!
This is AWESOME! All your resources and breakdowns have been extremely helpful to really getting down to the science of what is effective, thank you for your generous time and contributions.
Not the article I thought I’d need but definitely the one I needed.
I was recently let off from a lead role of a massive group (250,000+ members, 4 months ago) and I had been serving as every single role as far as the eye could tell, including designer. A fitting term, designer arrogance, describes the feelings I had throughout that job. It’s amazing how much we can think we’re right and prefer to bank it all on our pride.
Although I like to think that I did good in the role, there was a lot I could do better and one of the fundamentally failed aspects that definitely led to my dismissal was designer arrogance. Analytics is a good starting point for breaking through that, by seeing what players actually like. Turns out you actually do work for the customer and not often yourself, because they might not like what you like.
Thank you for sharing this article as well as your own fairly recent experience as well. It’s telling that it’s never too late to start rebounding and making improvements to your work ethic as much as it is telling that not changing bad habits can lead up into frequent failure, even for years. These resources delving into common yet ignored, hidden or otherwise unaddressed problems in development can help reshape some views about what works and what doesn’t.
Honestly was just going to quickly skim, but ended up reading the whole article. It’s well-written, and super relatable.
Over the past year, I’ve been slowly refining certain parts of my game Book of Monsters, and have seen several improvements. There’s still so much more to do, but I definitely agree with looking into what your players enjoy most. Analytics and running elaborate tests can be overwhelming, but are super useful in the long run for your overall knowledge.