The folks over at Bethesda Softworks put up a post about iterative design. While the focus is on level design in particular, it is an awesome breakdown on the iterative process in general. I think that if I had to adhere to a design philosophy for game development, it would be the iterative process. You want your game to be fun and you want to drop ideas that aren’t and emphasize ideas that are. You can only do that if you get feedback early in development so you don’t rip up too much work. (Or release a boring game.)

Read it. It’s long, but do it! It’s good stuff.

I’m back. I’m on a roll. This will be the culmination of everything I’ve explained up to now, so let’s get to it! I rhetorically ask you again, what makes a good story? Actually, we should be asking, “What makes up a story?” On second thought, maybe it should be, “What is a story?”

What is a story?

I’m not gonna lie. I’m no creative writing scholar. I’m a programmer and an economist. I have no qualms about analyzing “the whole” and logically breaking it down into manageable parts. You can do it with art. You can do it with stories. I’ve been a reader and writer since I was 6. If you knew me and had to choose who loved books more, it’d be hard to pick between me and Twilight Sparkle. I guess you could say I have “real world” experience with stories?

Anyway. What’s a story?

A story is a thing kids will ask their parents to read to them at bedtime, but it is the final product of a collection of things. At the time of this writing, I can really only break a story down into three basic parts. It’s enough for now:

• Characters
• Settings
• Plot

These three things make up a story. Their order is very important. I believe that the reason you even tell a story is (usually) to show how characters grow under certain circumstances. I mean, there are plenty of reasons to tell stories, but I’m specifically talking about purely imagined fiction. (Let’s leave aside historical fiction and allegory and such. They can clearly have other reasons for being told.) The characters depend on settings. Plot is what happens when the characters operate in their settings. As you follow the plot from beginning to end, your story unfolds.

Don’t worry. I’ll explain. You might not agree, but you’ll know I’m not just pulling this out of thin air.

Characters are king.

Let’s break things down even more. Characters are of ultimate importance. They are the whole reason your story exists. When you out and say it, a lot of people seem to bristle at the idea that characters are king. But think about it. You relate to the characters, not the setting or plot.

There’s a reason you root for characters and for good things or bad things to happen to them. You forge a relationship with them. You either like them or you don’t. There’s a reason TV shows preserve the same cast of characters. Nobody wants to spend time rebuilding the relationship between the viewer and the character. There’s a reason nobody likes it when actors are changed for the character. It feels unnatural. People in real life don’t do that. We all put a lot of attention into characters.

What makes a good character?

Here we go. Digging deeper and deeper. I don’t want to go too deeply here, because this question will probably be its own post in the future. Suffice it to say that a good character is a believable character. It’s a simple statement, but extremely difficult to pull off.

Authors are always talking about character design. They’ve got to have a description. They’ve got to have a history. (Even if you don’t disclose that history, they need a history. History determines past experience that shapes their current reactions to settings and other characters.) They’ve got to have long-term goals and short-term goals, and you have to decide how much they’ll sacrifice to achieve those goals. They’ve got to have personal strengths, but most of all they have to have personal weaknesses that they try to overcome. Then you’ve got the map of a believable character.

Once you design the rules of the character, you turn them loose into your setting with other characters you’ve created and the interaction between characters will more than likely happen automatically. You know when authors will sometimes say they started writing one story and it turned into the story they actually finished? That’s because the rules designed for the characters didn’t work out as planned once they started interacting. That’s not bad. That’s believable!

You can’t just have characters.

As much as characters are king, there are still two other parts to a story. The next most important being the setting. What is the backdrop for the character? What year is it? What country is it? What universe is it? Do they live in an apartment? A castle? A motor inn after a zombie apocalypse? This is where the imagination comes into play.

Sure, you have to imagine characters, but you really need to concentrate on believable characters. A character’s reactions to things need to make sense. If they just had their closest friend killed in front of them, they are not going to be fine with that. That’s not a realistic character. A setting, on the other hand, is fully left up to the imagination!

This is where I love to have the most unrealistic things in a story. I want fantasy. I want science fiction. I want a deeply frozen world teeming with magical energy or a space ship orbiting an Earth that’s lost its atmosphere. Maybe it’s a city filled with fairy tale characters living in the real world. The point is, I want to experience something that I simply can’t experience in the real world.

The setting has to make sense in its own way, of course. But with a setting, you just need to define a set of arbitrary rules and stick to them. If you can only use magic by writing spells, then make sure you stick to it. Maybe water floats when it’s heated. It doesn’t make sense in the physics of the real world, but if it’s natural for your world, then make sure you stick to it. For example, if water floats when it’s heated, people would have developed tools to keep water in the pot when they boiled it. (There’s so much nuance with building settings and worlds. I’m going to stop trying to discuss it now or I’ll never stop running cause and effect scenarios to show you how much of a world you’d impact by introducing even the weirdest set of rules…)

Characters and settings are very close-knit and play off each other. A character alone is nothing. Two characters in a white room is something, but not much. Two characters in settings designed for them to react with is what you’re aiming for. Once you have multiple characters and multiple settings all reacting to each other, then you’ve got the beginnings of a story.

In fact, what you’ve got is your plot.

A plot should emerge naturally.

This is me kind of getting into my own ideas now. I’ve taken the next step from what I’ve learned about characters and settings and this, to me, is the logical conclusion. You definitely have manual control over the plot. You have to decide when it starts and when it ends, but, believe it or not, you don’t have as much control as you think over where it starts and where it ends.

The plot is what happens when characters react with characters and settings. This is when you start getting people saying, “I started writing that story, but ended up with this story and it just kind of happened.” That’s because plot is the organic result of believable characters in their settings. All you should be prepared to provide is the general idea of what you want to happen, and an opening scene. If you designed things properly, your characters and settings should naturally propel you through the plot you want.

Chances are it won’t. You are human. You can’t predict everything every character will do. The good story teller will let the plot adapt into its more believable form. (Or change characters and settings so it flows naturally the way they want it to.) The bad story teller will try to force characters into fixed plot and you will have a story that feels like it could have been better.

Let’s take it back to games.

Think about everything I’ve outlined for you:

• Characters are king.
  • They react to their settings.
  • They react to other characters.
  • Their reactions must make sense.
• Settings are where your imagination shines.
  • The setting might not make sense in the context of our world.
  • It just has to make sense in context with the world it’s in.
• Plot is the natural product of character reactions.
  • Things happen when characters interact with characters.
  • Things happen when characters interact with settings.
  • Plot changes in ways you don’t expect based on these interactions.

Now think about everything I’ve said about story-driven games:

• Games demand interaction from the player.
  • No interaction? Why are you not writing a book, then?
• Story-driven games demand interaction from the player.
  • Give the player choices that affect the story.

Now step back and consider the player as simply a character in the story you’re trying to tell with the game. If plot is the natural result of characters reacting to the settings and other characters, and your player is simply the main character, it is completely natural that the plot changes to the player’s reactions.

It’s not some forced gameplay mechanic to have players directly influence the story of a game. It fits entirely with everything that makes a story even be a story. They are a character. They react to their environment. The plot changes based on their reactions. It would do this anyway if you designed good characters. Good characters will always react in ways you didn’t expect.

All the game designer has to do is offer the player enough choices!

Simple, right? Haha. Right? Haha. Ha. Haha. Yep.

So, to recap the last post, I’ve outlined what I think makes a good game. Choice does. Give people choices. Give them interaction. That will make your game good. If your game has neither, then why is it a game? Out of the two basic types of games, sandbox and story-driven, I think sandbox is the purest form of game. But a game without a story has no direction. The game will work as long as people can come up with their own direction. Minecraft comes to mind. It has no story, but players create their own goals. Survive the first night. Find diamonds. Find the dungeon. Defeat the Ender Dragon. Maybe they’ll install a mod like Tekkit to give them specialized goals. Build a quarry. Build a nuclear reactor. Build a Red Matter generator. It all comes down to giving people a choice of what they want to do, but there has to be something for them to do.

That last part. That’s a huge point.

There has to be something to do.

I don’t know about you, but I got bored with Minecraft after finding diamonds. There were plenty of choices to make. I could do anything, really. But what was the point? There wasn’t a point. After I found a dungeon and killed the Ender Dragon, what would I get out of it? I mean, you never ultimately get anything out of entertainment except a distraction. But did I learn anything from building a giant castle? Not really. Maybe I learned creativity, but what’s the point of a castle in Minecraft when it comes down to it? Well, that is rather the point of sandbox games! That there is no point! Do whatever you want! Nothing’s holding you back. It’s fun sometimes!

Sometimes.

What gives games a reason to be played?

How would you answer the question? Just like how you can’t answer with “money” the question of why you want to start a business, don’t answer this question with “fun.” Fun, like profit is for businesses, is the result of making a good game. You get “fun” from a game built correctly. So what makes a game fun?

Games are fun when the players feel like they got something out of their session. If the game is broken, they’re going to walk away angry that they couldn’t get something out of playing it. Maybe the player learned something. Maybe they were successfully distracted from the world. Maybe they reached the top of the leaderboards. There has to be something they got out of playing the game. The reason to play is mostly to work toward a goal for a feeling of accomplishment. Open-ended/open-world games do that for a while, but then you stop feeling like you’re accomplishing anything because you’ve accomplished everything you want to accomplish. You get bored.

Story-driven games have a different criteria for their reason to be played. You get something different out of a story-driven game. The sense of accomplishment comes from uncovering a story that you care about and are invested in. A story-driven game will be boring not because you’ve run out of things to accomplish, but because you don’t feel like you’ll get anything out of finishing the story. You don’t care about what happens. The reason you play a story-driven game is the story! Of course. Duh. It’s the name of the game. “Story-driven.”

We have to take it one step further. Good stories make good story-driven games. Choices make good games. Story-driven games need a good story with choices to be a good story-driven game. Why does the story need choices for it to be a good game if you’re playing for the story? It all goes back to the reason why you’re a game and not a book or a movie. A book or a movie depends entirely upon having a good story. If you want to tell a story, write a book. Make a movie. If you want the viewer to interact, you make a game.

What makes a good story-driven game?

If you want to tell a story with a game, you better make sure that the player can interact with the story. By allowing the player to interact with the story, you are going to give the player the opportunity to make choices that affect the story. You better make sure that the choices provided cover the basics of what anyone would want to do in any given situation. And then you better make sure those choices somehow influence and change the story or we’re going to wind up with a game that has no point to it again. There’s a lot of “you better” here, but I’m trying to make a point. Given all the things I believe make a good game, this part is simply the logical conclusion:

• You want to make a game.
  • You want a player to interact with your content.
  • You don’t want the linear presentation of a book or a movie.
• You want to tell a story.
  • You aren’t making a sandbox game.
  • The player’s interaction is not necessarily with the world, but the story.

Here’s where I make the point to mention Telltale’s The Walking Dead series of games. That is what makes a good story-driven game. You aren’t in a sandbox. You can’t run around and create your own story. You are participating in a story that has already been created for you. This isn’t a bad thing. It’s why you bought the game! Because it’s a story in a game, though, you should expect to be able to interact with the story and change it because you are playing a game. If you couldn’t change the story, you would be better off reading a book or watching a movie. The story has a defined beginning and you start to unfold the story. The story changes radically based entirely on your decisions.

You get to see the consequences of your actions. Not the actions of a pre-defined character in a book. Your actions! This is what makes you invested in the game and gives you a point to playing. Having a sense of accomplishment doesn’t really apply in the literal sense, but you get to see where your choices led you in the end. Because you’re allowed to make choices, you have a choice on which characters to make friends with. You become attached to the characters because you are interacting with them. It’s your world. You’re living in it. Because it’s you.

Okay. Enough reiterating! I think I’ve made my point.

I’ll address what makes a good story sometime.

This is the ultimate question in game development. Everyone thinks they have the answer to this, otherwise they wouldn’t be making the games they make. There are objective things to look for like if the controls even work or if the game crashes or if you can adjust graphics quality on a PC or any number of functional, code-level stuff that makes a game “good.” What I’m after are the subjective things. Ya’know, the ones everyone gets upset about when you question them because people can’t come up with a reason other than “it’s art.” (Is my cynicism showing? Sorry.)

Forgive the terse sounding tone, but I believe if you can’t explain the reasons why the objective and subjective elements of anything makes that thing “good,” then you don’t really have an opinion and should either take the time to figure it out or stop pretending you do. I would expect nothing less of myself, which is why I’m now going to tell you what I think makes good games and why I think they make good games.

Obviously, lots of what I will be saying is up for debate. Here is the disclaimer saying that what I’m going to lay out for you is opinion, not fact, and will be different for every person. The point is that I can explain the way I think and let people know I’m not just shouting in the wind. I have reasons. So should you besides “you’re wrong!”

Choice makes good games.

There. One sentence. We’re done. You can move along now.

Oh. The explanation part. Okay, here goes…

When you read a book, what do you do? It’s not a trick question. Literally, what do you do? You start at the first page, you stop at the last page, and you’re done. It could have been the most amazing book ever, I’m not talking about that. I’m talking about linearity. (Is that a word? It is now.) You’re being taken for a ride by the author. When you watch a movie, what do you do? Same thing. You’re being taken for a ride. It starts. It ends. If you go back to do it again, you get the same ride. It starts. It ends. The story unfolds the same way.

There is no interaction with a movie. The interaction with a book starts and stop with turning pages. Games encourage interaction! You play a character. Sometimes you play the hero! Sometimes you play a character who gets side-lined by the hero at the very end and the player gets upset because Martin Septim was the one that turned into an Avatar of Akatosh and kicked the butt of Lord Dagon and saved the world and the player didn’t. (I mean. What? No. I don’t… That wasn’t… I didn’t… Shut up.)

Games demand interaction. You have a set of controls and you control the character and you make things unfold. At least, that’s what they try to do. Lately, games dupe you into thinking you’re the one unfolding the story when you’re really just watching a series of predetermined events happen as you move around. Games are deceiving anymore. If you’re not turned loose in a multiplayer arena of death and carnage, you’re just watching a movie that progresses as you push the W key or push forward on the left stick. It might be a good story, don’t get me wrong. But it doesn’t make a good game. Lots of modern games would make a better movies.

There are two kinds of games.

1: There are sandbox games.

There are open-ended games with little to no story that turn you loose on the game world and you do whatever the heck you want. This is Minecraft. This is Grand Theft Auto. This is Elder Scrolls. This is Terraria. This is Fallout. I believe these are good games simply because they give you (mostly) unrestricted gameplay. Do whatever you want. Period. Infinite choice, to use pointless hyperbole.

I love these kinds of games, but they eventually wear out. Once the excitement of infinite potential wears off, you start to realize that there is actually a finite amount of things to do. Minecraft? I’ve dug to the bottom of the world. I’ve built to the top of the world. I’ve installed Tekkit and built Red Matter generators and nuclear power plants. I’ve started multiplayer wars that devastated the continent with Red Matter explosives. Then I got bored. In Starbound, I reached tier 10 and… Got bored. In Morrowind I created a compounded intelligence potion that allowed me to create any spell I wanted. Then I got bored.

Notice the trend? With an open world, I strive to achieve the pinnacle of whatever system is in the game. Then I get bored. It might be open-ended, but I still came up with a goal, reached it, and then got bored. Plus, it doesn’t help that there’s no story. Or little story. Or inconsequential story. Honestly, I don’t find the story of open-ended games to be very enthralling. Did I finish the story in Oblivion? I sure did. Did I care about the story in Oblivion? Absolutely not. It was an objective that needed finished so I could experience one part of the open-ended world. Even open-ended worlds start with goals. Once you finish the goals, the game might as well be over even if it’s open-ended.

Don’t get me wrong! I love open-ended games. I believe they’re the best games of all. They embody the reason you play games: Interaction! I love that I can choose to do whatever I want in order to achieve an objective. It doesn’t matter that the game doesn’t end. It matters that the game doesn’t limit your actions. Choice! Give me choices! If there’s nothing left to do in a game that doesn’t end, it’s still over.

2: There are story-driven games.

While I believe open-world/open-ended games are the best games of all, I don’t want to make those kinds of games. They are incredibly difficult to make. I have no interest in making them. What I want to make are the other kind of games: Story-driven games. I have stories I want to tell. I don’t want you give you a giant playground. Someone else can do that better than me and I have no problem saying that. (Maybe someday I will want to make one, but not today.)

Story-driven games. This is Mass Effect. This is The Walking Dead. This is Alan Wake. This is Singularity. This is Dragon Age: Origins. These are games with a beginning and an end. There is nothing sandbox about them, but I picked my list very carefully. These are what I consider to be the ultimate in story-driven games. Most of them offer you choices to come at problems from multiple direction. Alan Wake and Singularity do not, but I consider them good story-driven games because the stories are exceptionally good.

(As a quick aside, story-driven horror games can get away with being on rails. You may not have many story-related choices, but because you are the character in a world of horror, the limited interaction you do have is moving your character. When you poke around, you’re terrified and you care that you have to poke around. I will probably write up a whole post about interaction later to discuss how less control is sometimes better and when it can be better.)

The other three games (Mass Effect, The Walking Dead, and Dragon Age) are known for giving you more choices than you can handle to influence amazing stories. Mass Effect is, brace yourself, at the low end of the spectrum here. Yes, it’s a multi-part story that remembers choices from previous parts, but what choices do you really have when it comes down to it? You have the Paragon choice, the Renegade choice, and the neutral choice. Sometimes you have the say on who lives or dies and then that character is dropped from the story. It’s a good system, but it’s not great. It’s too binary. Good. Evil. Overly simplistic. Good, but simple. (Trust me, I like Mass Effect.)

Dragon Age: Origins is at the middle ground. You have a wider range of choices that feel like they have more of an impact on things because you are invested in your character because of the origin system. You create your character. That always automatically makes you invested in things. The story of Dragon Age, in and of itself, is not really something I cared about, but I argue that the game was about the characters, not the story. The choices you made impacted the characters. The story didn’t change. It worked for Dragon Age.

The Walking Dead, I think, is the perfect story-driven game. It is entirely about the characters. Period. The story is the characters. (This post is about what makes a good game, not a good story, so I will try not to go off track.) The choices you make have serious repercussions on the characters, and since the characters are the story, you directly influence the story. As I mentioned in my last post, there are certain fixed points that you can’t avoid, but in spite of those, you do influence the story. Because you are making choices that hugely impact everyone around you, which in turn impacts your character (who you did not create, and so did not start with any attachments), you are wholly invested in the game’s story.

There’s a common theme.

Did you notice it? The common theme? CHOICE. Sandbox games are built out of choice. The best story-driven games are the ones with so much choice that you can influence the story. They give you reasons to play multiple times with different results. Different results means a reason to play multiple times. It’s the same story, but you experience a different branch of it.

I don’t think I need to beat it into your head any more. Choice. Choice! CHOICE. Okay, so I beat it into your head some more. No matter what game you play, it is only good, in my opinion, if you have a choice in the matter. Now we can identify bad games. Bad games are games with little to no choice. You are along for the ride. If you play it again, you will be presented with the same series of events. It might be a game designed to rely entirely on gameplay such as with multiplayer games like Battlefield 3 or Team Fortress or League of Legends.

But have you ever finished the campaign for Battlefield 3 because it was fun? Or did you finish it because you wanted the unlocks? Me? I didn’t even finish the Battlefield 3 campaign. It was AWFUL. I had to do things the same way every time I failed. I just had to do the same thing faster. There was no room to think outside the box. Just follow the objectives. I believe such games are a waste of time. If you had a story to tell, you would be better off telling it in a movie.

So, what makes a good game? Repeat after me: Choice.

I take to heart the advice I hear from people I consider successful. I would be the world’s most arrogant person if I didn’t. Over and over again, I hear them say, “Always have a reason for everything that you do.”

There’s a catch, though. It can never be money. It can never be fame. They will say, “Wealth and fame are an illusion.” If the reason you’re doing something is money or fame, then you’re doing it wrong. You might not fail. You might even thrive. But if you do it for money or fame, what you’re doing won’t have a point. It won’t be guided by any principles. You will be guided solely by the pursuit of profit and you will do whatever it takes to get it. That’s not good.

That is not to say that money isn’t good. Money is good. As an economist, I’ve learned the proper role of money. Profit is the means of measuring whether or not you are making something that benefits someone. That’s all it is. Someone values your work enough to compensate you for your time and work. Profit is the goal of a business, because profit means the business is working correctly. Profit cannot be the goal of a person.

What are my reasons?

Reason 1: I have stories to tell.

The simple fact of the matter is that my brain is overflowing with stories I want to tell. I have been a gamer since the days of playing on a Commodore Amiga 1000 at the age of 6. We stupidly gave it away and we only had a typewriter for a few years. That’s when I started writing. For as long as I remember, I’ve always imagined my stories with a cinematic flare. It’s probably because I’m a very visual person. Whenever I write, I think of how it would be translated into a movie. Not because I think anything I do would be licensed for a movie one day, but because that’s just how I think.

I love books, don’t get me wrong. I love movies, too. But when I write stories, I realize I can never describe things perfectly. I know everyone will walk away with different ideas. (Just look at the level of description in The Lord of the Rings. All that painstaking description and the movies were still mixed up from what I’d imagined.) I know I can’t make movies. That’s entirely not in my skill set, and I just don’t want to make them.

More than a visual story, I want interactive stories. I want people to be able to pick the path they want, but still be my story. I don’t want to make a story on rails. C.S. Lewis once said, “I can’t imagine a man really enjoying a book and reading it only once.” I don’t entirely agree with that. I mean, I’ve read The Lord of the Rings and The Chronicles of Narnia multiple times, but most books I read once and move on. It’s not because I don’t think they’re not good, but it’s because I’m capable of clearly remembering the story and if I read it again, it’d just be the same experience.

That is my first reason: I have stories to tell. Visual stories. Interactive stories.

Reason 2: Too many games are on rails.

I’m sick of stories on rails. If you play it once, you’ve played it. It’s over. If you play it again, it’ll be the same. I don’t want to get into game design philosophy at this point, so suffice it to say that I think modern games are too restricted. Stories have a beginning and end, obviously, but games are increasingly becoming a type of “use your keyboard to watch this movie” experience.

I’m tired of wasting my time on games that don’t let me do what I want. If the only chance I have of affecting the story is the player character dying because I didn’t shoot fast enough and I have to replay the level, you really are better off just making a movie. The story might be amazing, but it’s too narrow of an experience. It would be perfect as a movie, not as a game. At the very least, games should have multiple ways of approaching the objectives, but even that is less and less of something games provide. There is too much of doing one thing in a game over and over and over again until you do it a certain way.

That is my second reason: I want to play games that give me choices. Since so few make them, I will make them!

Reason 3: Too many games do it wrong.

It seems arrogant to just out and say, “Your game did it wrong. I know how to do it better.” It seems arrogant, but there’s always that little kernel of “I can do it better” that moves people to creation. You take the general idea of something and you improve upon it in a way that seems better to you. I keep playing games that I enjoy very much, but there’s always this one thing that makes me go, “Your game would have been better than good if you just focused on this feature a little more.”

I want to be clear that I’m not bashing a game when I say this about a game. I don’t know the reason why a game doesn’t focus on a certain feature. Maybe it wasn’t the point of the game. Maybe they didn’t notice it. Maybe ran out of time. Maybe they didn’t notice it at all. Like how Orcs Must Die didn’t have multiplayer until the second version. That was a game that needed multiplayer. They fixed it with Orcs Must Die 2, but it’s still an example of a game that had room for improvement.

Another example is Telltale’s The Walking Dead series of games. (Bias warning: I absolutely love them. I think Telltale games are some of the best PC games at the moment.) The game is fantastic! I’ve watched many plays on YouTube and played it myself. Experiencing the game that many times with so many divergent choices being made each time made me notice something. There are too many fixed points. No matter how far apart two directions could possibly be, there is always some part of the story you’ll arrive at that will have the same outcome no matter what. This has to happen to some extent, and, like I said above, it could be for any number of reasons. I just think they happen far too often.

That is my third reason: I think there are issues in certain genres of games that I can improve upon in my own games.

Are these good reasons?

I have no idea. But they are reasons. Reasons that aren’t money and fame. It seems like it’s an odd fusion of selfishness and selflessness. On the one hand, I believe I am for some reason the only person who thinks there are things wrong with games and that I know how to fix them. On the other hand, I believe other people are wanting the same things fixed and would love games that take a different approach, so I will make those games for myself and those people.

There is more to what I want to do than just those reasons, too. I have a very clear idea of what I think makes games good, but that will be for the next post. These are just the reasons why I want to make games. I don’t know if they’re good enough, but at least I have some. Only time will show if they prove to be enough, and I’m sure I’ll change my mind as time goes on, as well.

I didn’t expect to be resurrecting my blog so soon. I had removed my old one since I didn’t think I needed it, and I wanted to clean up 6+ year old content while also symbolically marking some changes in my life. But here it is, not even a week later, and I’m here with a brand new site. Why?

I’m increasingly interested in games. Not playing them. Making them. I want to build games, but I have no real developed skill in building them in spite of being a programmer. I’m interested in what makes games fun, what makes characters good, what makes stories make sense, and in how to get everything to work in code.

I know some of those things, but not all. I’m a writer and gamer, so I think I know what makes a good game. I’ve been a programmer for a very long time, but I do not know how to code a good game. I have a degree in economics, so I think I know what it takes to start a business, but I’ve never done it before.

Ultimately, I want to start my own independent game development company. I will be using this new blog to document my (perhaps ill-fated) journey. I will also be writing articles where I attempt to explain my design philosophies in a place that isn’t Facebook or Twitter.

I’m a full-time developer already, so I can only imagine how long any of this will take, but I’m going to try. I don’t have the skills to be hired by a game studio right now, but there’s literally absolutely nothing stopping me from doing any of this myself. It’s time to learn, work hard, and be awesome.