Follow the Fun

Protoype, demo, repeat. Yes, yes, yes!!

We like to think about this process as the game discovering itself over time. Because as iterators, rather than designers, it’s our job to simply play the game, listen to it, feel it, and kind of feel out what it seems to want to become - and just follow the trails of what’s fun. — Seth Coster, “Crashlands: Design by Chaos” (GDC 2018)

Then:

Interestingly the designer’s role shifts a bit from creative overlord to active listener. They must be attentive to what the game (via play testers) is “saying”. They must be willing to explore those more interesting aspects, abandoning bad ideas and letting go of their initial ideas along the way. I love this methodology and it’s not dissimilar to how we build websites at Paravel, iterating and oversharing our works-in-progress in Slack.

And last this bit of wisdom was maybe my favorite, though perhaps not directly related to the subject at hand:

Don’t throw your pearls to swine by tweeting things to randos on Twitter.