Most importantly: Once I have a design you’re 99% confident about, I kill my darlings. I take the idea and ask myself: What are all the various things I need to do to make this happen? Then I rank them in order of importance and for time management. During this process I usually find that some of the clever features fall like a rock to the bottom of the list: They’re amazing features, I love them, but they’re totally unnecessary to the design. I doubt I’ll get to them in time, and maybe the design will actually be better with them streamlined out.<\/li>\n <\/ul>\n My second Ludum Dare, Erased (for #22, the Alone theme) was a tenative success: I released a product. I spent the next month refining it, and it was much more playable in the post-LD version. Even though there was much more that could have been done, at some point I finally admitted that nobody wanted a roguelike that wasn’t rogue-like, and it wasn’t worth polishing. That’s kind of a corollary to “kill your darlings.” Sometimes code is only digestible if you cook it on a rock and then eat the rock instead. Well-meaning programmers can create that code. Don’t feel bad about a failed project, and especially don’t feel bad about the risks you took in the design. Code is cheap if you write it often. Take new and different risks, put in a more thoughtful and skillful effort, and you’ll find that eventually, the risks pay off.<\/p>\n
My third Ludum Dare, mini-LD #37, I’m calling a huge success. Little Stories was *exactly* what I envisioned. I removed game mechanics, control systems, and a lot of planned content never made it, but the design wasn’t something I expected to be feature-rich. It wasn’t a platformer, even though it looks like a platformer. For one thing, you can’t jump. You don’t kill anything. The whole goal was different. Not having a template was freeing to me, and suddenly I didn’t have to include something because games of genre X just always\u00a0have<\/strong>\u00a0Y. So my final piece of advice is, even if you have a genre, keep cutting. Kill their darlings too.<\/p>\n So, in review:
\n Kill your darlings,<\/p>\n
Kill your darlings,<\/p>\n
Kill their darlings too.<\/p>\n
All the darlings.<\/p>","time":"December 12th, 2012 4:18 pm","title":"I\u2019m In"}