51 Game Design Tips! (In 8 Minutes)

I have 51 game design tips and ideas for you from 51 games I've played I know know let's come down all of the games I'm about to show you are from Wow a game gem and I hope that this video will be inspiring for everybody who's currently working on a game or looking for a game idea let's go a couple of simple tricks like a vignette and drop shadows for your sprites can make your game look a lot better although in this case it's cool that the style stays consistent even in the menu healing and repairing your environment can be just as satisfying as tearing it down making a game where everything interacts with everything can use some very interesting results in this game here for example enemies are able to pick up objects and throw them at you and this hydraulic press is not only able to crush you but it is also capable of crushing enemies that makes the entire game system pretty authentic and alive purposefully making something hard to control is an interesting premise and especially in local multiplayer games it can lead to some very funny situations it feels surprisingly refreshing to walk around in a game without being constrained by invisible walls grid-based can be a very good idea for puzzle games because it makes it easy to give the player feedback on what's going on you can take activities that are already fun like coding and turn them into games to make them even more fun it is a good idea to let players know what they are supposed to do and to be very clear about that if you have multiple playable characters in your game it can be very cool to give them different abilities that synergize with each other in your tutorial allow players to make mistakes but make sure they know what to do after they've screwed up this text box here doesn't explain to me how the mechanic in this room works it just tells me how to restart and I'll be able to figure the rest out myself if you find a cool fun interesting mechanic then make sure the player has to use it quite frequently keep exploring the mechanic and maybe even bring it into your boss fight simple game ideas can be surprisingly fun when well executed if the controls feel tight if the sound effects are rewarding if the balancing is on point it just feels nice don't be afraid to make an entirely abstract game because they can often allow you to come up with very unique and interesting game systems making enemies fight amongst each other can create a really cool action-packed battlefield it might be rather to think about alternative input methods like voice control if you need a tutorial screen make one that is very easy to understand and also sets the right mood for the game although the game looks pretty cool as well have you ever tried making a game where you control both the player as well as the enemies with the same keys it's very interesting and I see potential for more games to try this take an existing game and turn it into something new and original here we have basically Tetris being played in two directions to build a tree pixel art games usually look a lot better when all of the pixels always have the same size and as you can see here minimalistic characters can look very nice with a good design smoothing the movement of some objects out of it can have a nice feel to it and having a colored stripe on your walls is a good way to make them more visible multi-purpose mechanics are always cool in this case shooting is used both for moving around as well as for killing enemies use mechanics that synergize with each other for example in this game you can shoot downwards to increase your jump height make your game sound nice and don't be afraid to use a bit more abstract sounds a well-balanced difficulty curve is definitely worth a lot this game absolutely managed to get me into a flow State even though it looks so simple you can use music to communicate the current state of the game also I think being able to bring objects from one level to another is an interesting mechanic and probably something more developers should play around with it can often look pretty dope to give your black tones a bit of color the black in this game for example isn't really black it's more of a dark red giving your sprites a simple bouncy squiggle animation is an easy and cost-efficient way to animate them and it still makes them feel a lot more alive than having no animation at all only being able to influence certain objects indirectly can be a very fun challenge using a zig color scheme as one of the best ways to make a zig looking game usually complementary colors like blue yellow blue orange worked pretty well together being able to edit a level while playing it feels like a pretty damn cool idea you know why is the influence of the player always limited to the player character let's expand our thinking do not make puzzles heart by making them big a good puzzle is relatively small in my opinions or you can Z and process all of the information you need at once there's absolutely nothing wrong with making a super simplistic casual game in fact it might even be smart because these games can be enjoyed pretty much by everybody create every single sprite out of a coconut doesn't matter which kind of game you're making I think this is some very universally applicable advice it's so cute here we have another example for a great multi-purpose mechanic we're shooting jumping and running is all on the same button and although it's a pretty nice color scheme see nothing fancy here just nice colors to face gameplay can be quite fun where you place a couple of objects in phase one and then see how they interact with each other in Phase two here we once again have great colors a constant size for the pixels multiple characters that complement each other with their abilities first the player to stay on the move and not just run in circles and if you can make the HP bar part of the enemy design that super cool make objects interact with each other that's just interesting in this game enemies explode when they collide with each other they can fight each other you can even merge two items into a new one if there a lot of interesting interactions in your game that means there's a lot to explore you throw away a perfectly good hammer into the furnace good job and another contestant for the best color scheme here the interesting thing is that you move all of your pieces in a row or column at once be smart about the way you implement your tutorial almost anything is better than a giant wall of text having the text on the side here and letting me try everything out myself feels like a pretty good solution simply making the player create something beautiful can make for a satisfying game even if it's not all that challenging one interesting movement mechanic can be more than enough to create a super interesting game yes rattling hooks have existed before but you can just give it your own unique twist to make it your own speaking of grappling hooks they don't even need to be used for movement you can also use them for puzzle solving get creative big raising numbers are kind of addicting as clicker games have proven time and time again and they give you a sense of progression health being stored physically in the center of the map instead of showing it in a boring UI interface great idea this character controls differently depending on how slim or fat he is all of the interactions are pretty intuitive if you even lose a bit of weight when you jump I also like that there are two losing conditions becoming too fat and becoming too slim both result in you losing using a cool background texture can level up the look of your game quite a bit and a few objects around you interact with each other and not just with you the game world feels a lot more alive don't underestimate text adventures the beginning of this one captured me quite a bit actually there are some how is something satisfying about cleaning up and clearing an entire level of dirt having to move multiple objects at once with a limited amount of moves is an interesting challenge it was a three day game jam and one interesting thing I try to do with my game was to always keep it in a finished state so here you can see after day one you can already play it all the way through the game they - still a finished game I just added a couple of new mechanics like this light and I improved the tutorial a bit and on day three I just did polishing and created some custom sound effects this feels like a pretty stress-free way to create your game because you never need to be afraid that you won't be able to finish this YouTube channel is all about growing as a game developer and help you to grow as a game developer so I'm very happy that I finally got my hands on a lot of your games gives me a bit of an idea where my audience stands in terms of game development and expect another video where we can address some of the issues I could see in this gem some of the things we could try to work on together as a team so we can all keep making better and better games there's Jonas making games with you see you in the next one

Channel: Jonas Tyroller

Views: 159,282

Keywords: Game Design Tips, Game Design Tutorial, Game Design Basics, Game Design For Beginners, Game Design Ideas, Game Design Inspiration, Game Design, Game Development, Game Dev Tips, Tips, Tricks, Tutorial, Game Dev, Game Development Inspiration, Game Ideas

Id: 5ijuH_oMu-U

Length: 8min 7sec (487 seconds)

Published: Fri Feb 08 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/LoneAStudios]

Great video! :) I'm an aspiring game developer as well. I would love to hear your thoughts on the game I'm currently making. It's a very simple concept : Each room is a maze and you need to escape rooms by finding keys. Meanwhile your light is slowly dying so you need to find oil located at random spots within the maze. You can check it out on my youtube or just comment here if you find any time! :) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m3J37oOXjfQ&t=12s I could use a "mentor" :)

[u/[deleted]]

This is really cool! When I participate in game Jams... I could only play a few before I get antsy and want to develop, then burn out from my idea.

I like this because it really lets me see a much much bigger range of ideas and really gets my brain going. Thanks for making this.

[u/bilalakil]

One thing that I noticed popped up a few times, with good reason, is to have "enemies" or objects interact with each other - not just the player. I think that's really great advice and will try to work more with that personally!

Also, what you've shown is a great way to make the most out of game jams! It's a lot of effort to look at all 51 games though 😣

Thanks so much for compiling this! It's a lot to take in haha - am about to watch for a second time 😀