Four common questions

I’ve been using ask.fm for the past few months, answering questions from both developers and gamers alike. There are a number of questions that I’ve received more often than any other, and instead of answering those on ask.fm or Twitter, I wanted to sit down and write a proper response. Here are the four most common questions I get about independent game development and my answer to those questions.

How can I get started, or how can I get better at making games?

The answer to this question is always disappointing to many, but the answer truly is to make a game. Games can be infinitely complex, from designing mechanics, creating spritesheets, to writing code. The defining difference between a ‘better’ developer and a ‘lesser’ one isn’t technical knowledge - it’s experience. If you have absolute no experience, I would recommend visiting Pixel Prospector for a list of game development tools to play around with. Download a bunch of them, and in each one - regardless of what you want to make - get started making Pong, Breakout, Pacman and Space Invaders. When you’ve got those down, visit Compohub to see what game jams are happening and participate in a few. Independent of what you want to do in the industry, working in small teams or alone forces you to learn about and interact with every aspect of game development.

How do I get more attention for my game?

The baseline is a good game. That’s where you start, you make a good game. You make something that’s personal, unique, interesting or better than anything else that exists. You’re going to want to think about a number of things:

With marketing efforts, don’t believe in “less is more”. Until you’re somewhat established, more is more. Don’t be afraid to reach out to anything you feel is beyond your size, and don’t feel scared to follow up once or twice. Persistence is key.

What do you feel is the most important trait in a game developer?

The ability to communicate and be communicated to. It doesn’t matter in what way - whether its verbal, through drawing or through prototypes - in the games industry communication is everything.

We’re dealing with very abstract ideas, statements that can be interpreted in endless ways and complex problems. The ability to clearly and properly communicate information, ideas, thoughts and problems in some way is something I value a lot. Vice versa, the ability to listen to someone and figure out what they’re really trying to say, even if they don’t quite have the words for it, is really important.

Even if you’re making a simple game - let’s say a straightforward shooter of sorts - it’s easy to say “people in level 3’s middle section think the game is too hard”, or to nod along when somebody says that. The problem is that that statement is infinitely confusing. Who is people? What is ‘the middle section’? Do they mean the game ‘up to level 3’s middle section’ is too hard, or that ‘level 3’s middle section’ is too hard? Why do they think it’s too hard? Is it the level design? Are there too many enemies? Not enough ammo? Wrong weapon types? Bad checkpointing? Poorly communicated goals? Do the enemies look too imposing? Is it unclear that you first have to flip that switch to make enemies vulnerable? Does the person telling you know what causes the perceived difficulty, and if so, how do they know? If not, how did they establish the problem in the first place?

Being able to communicate in a way that minimises potential sources of confusion, and being able to ask the questions that resolve gaps in what people communicate towards you will give you a huge advantage. If you learn how to and when to deal with the assumed agreement over communications in some way, you’ll find yourself much more capable to create, market and collaborate on whatever you’re making.

Why are you so loud about feminism?

I describe myself as a feminist because I believe in equality for men and women. However, feminism to me is just a tiny part of a larger struggle for equality for everybody. I believe that the equality debate in games is currently mostly concerned with gender equality because it’s such an obvious and large group in our medium that is entirely underrepresented. 

I want to see how much progress we can make there first, for women to be considered and treated as full equals by a majority of our industry. Beyond that, I have the same worries for people of colour, people with disabilities, people of different cultural backgrounds and perspectives, people that aren’t heterosexual, people of different socio-cultural backgrounds, people that don’t speak English and those of different nationalities.

Having lived my life as a Dutch-Arabic cis heterosexual able-bodied male, born to a middle-class family in the Netherlands, I’ve seen my share of both sides of privilege. I’ve seen how I get picked out for random checks at airports over a white male, but also how I don’t have to worry for my safety when going on a date.

During my travels, I’ve visited many a community of wonderful developers that simply don’t speak English, or that don’t have the funds to buy computers for at home. In some countries, the idea that one can't be creative for themselves because of the default state of working as an outsourcing partner for the West is so pervasive that I’m impressed they dare make something of their own. I think acknowledging that we are lucky to be able to even consider being our own person, with our own ambitions and dreams to pursue, is a big step.

This year, Mahdi Bahrami gave a talk at the GDC Experimental Gameplay Workshop (starts around 36:40) about his game Engare. He’s Iranian, and his language is Farsi - which shares the majority of its alphabet with Arabic. It was the first time I’ve seen the scripture of half of my identity on a screen at GDC. It wasn’t even Arabic, but something that resembled it in writing, and regardless of that fact, it still felt like an important moment to me.

Every time I see a list of ‘inspirational people’ in the industry, I count how many of them are female. I also count how many of them aren’t white, straight, English-speaking, white or highly educated. We have to start somewhere, and we shouldn’t fool ourselves into thinking we’re there when our ‘people lists’ have gender diversity. That’s really just step one.