Hello everyone! So, 32bit.cafe are right now doing a Back to School event, where they ask participants to make an educational/informative page on their site to teach about something “everyone knows.” The thing I am here to teach is probably not quite as universally thought of as “obvious”, but while I was sitting around in game design circles I was baffled by how rudimentary people’s understanding of their own games was.

And so, I am here to teach you all the basics of making your own game!

Step 1 is not learning how to code. I am sure several of you were thinking it. No, you do not need to learn to code to make your game.

This is actually part of the problem, people think of a game as a program that you run. A program that has a similar visual language and control scheme to other, similar programs in the past, but does something extra. You take Street Fighter, and you add gacha. You take Chess, and you add a fog of war. That’s how people tend to think of making games, and it’s why their game goes nowhere despite looking really cool.

A game is an experience, which I know sound like the most pretentious thing you’ve heard in your life, but hold with me here. Any piece of media that exists, exists to convey some sort of feeling upon the person consuming it. A game is no different; the reason people like to play these games is not actually because of the mechanics and the rules, but rather the feeling that these mechanics and rules give them. It’s why people might love one game while hating another that’s identical mechanically - because it doesn’t give them the same experience they are looking for.

When we make a game we’re in a bit of a pickle, because we as game designers are creating the game mechanics (the rules, dice, cards, etc). These game mechanics, when put in the hands of players, create dynamics (the ways in which players manipulate the mechanics to create strategies), and these mechanics create the experience/asthetic that the player is after. This is the Mechanics Dynamics Asthetics/MDA framework of games, and it’s a vital one. Because you want to create the Asthetics, but you can only manipulate the Mechanics, so you have a very roundabout job.

So step 1 of your game making journey is deciding what experience you want to pass onto your player. Do you want them to feel powerful? Do you want them to feel like a brilliant tactician? Do you want them to marvel at the wonders of the world? To feel like part of a social group? Whatever it is, pick what emotion you want the players to feel.

“Challenge” is not an emotion, Challenged is, and there is a world of difference between the two. I’ve talked to devs who talk about mechanics and visuals and I ask them “ok but, how do you want your player to feel?” and they stared at me like deer in headlights. They thought they needed to make their game harder, because that’s what people told them “good games” are, but nothing in their game seemed to indicate that the experience of a player was one of having to surmount incredible odds. One of these people was making a casual game about birds, for goodness’ sake!

Now, having your emotion, you need to work backwards to see what mechanics can create dynamics for this experience. For example, if you want to make someone feel like they’re part of a social group, you should make a game that’s for multiple players and has some element of cooperation, otherwise there is no social group to belong to. If you want a game where your player feels powerful, you need to give them a context of what weakness feels like, and then let them surmount that. If you want them to feel fear, make them weak and make every decision dangerous. If you want them to feel like tacticians, you make systems that have clear rules but unclear cascading effects.

Now that you have these two things, you can start making your game. “Wait, but where do I learn how to code?” That’s the secret cap, you don’t have to. Games can be made entirely in pen and paper, and most game design related decisions have very little to do with infrastructual decisions or the specific choice of netplay used in a title. To make a game, you just need to know what you want people to feel, and then you find out what creates that feeling by trying, fucking up, changing the rules, and trying again.

In this process you will need to change your rules nonstop. Any game I’ve made I’ve had to start from scratch atleast twice. Be open to change, it’s good.

But given enough time, you’ll have a game you can be proud of.