Before we begin let me give another warm welcome to returning guest artist Matt ko who is just the best guy we love having him
Anyway for a long time?
James just assumed this was the first lesson all designers learned and that it would be kind of redundant to do a whole show about
It not so apparently he's recently observed professional designers waste millions of dollars seen students cheated out of the education
They should have and graduating with no hope of getting a job in this industry and watched people trying to make games for the greatest
Good falter all because they didn't learn the one most basic lesson of design fail faster
This is the designers credo it is our Mantra
It is our goal with every waking second of every day fail faster
No idea is made fully formed no game you design will ever be right on the first pass the art of what we do is
Simply spiraling Towards a better center course-correcting along the way
fail faster because without testing and without exposing your thoughts to others and embracing how many horrible mistakes and egregious failures you made in your
Last pass you will never create a good game
fail faster by understanding that no idea is good by understanding [that] the high-level idea for Mario is a
plumber on drugs that the concept behind Sonic is an indigo [hedgehog] and sneakers that can run really fast and that the pitch line for
Gears of war is linebackers with Chainsaw guns these ideas are all terrible, and they're all great as mere ideas
They're meaningless choose something anything begin to iterate and fail faster any
Plan is better than no plan because even though your plan is inevitably full of miserable misconceptions
That'll lead you headlong into problems as you go to and from there. You can start to correct your [course] towards
What's really right too many times James has seen teams Spin their wheels debating concepts and high-level
Ideas and starting to work only once they felt they had the best possible idea
But that perfect idea of theirs was as human and as flawed and as fundamentally broken as all of our ideas
And now they'd spent so much time dreaming up that perfect idea that they had no time left to iterate on it now those perfect
Ideas are relegated to bargain bins or lingering on one of those unseen
Projects that never shipped because they were unable to mill out all the flaws meanwhile ideas like hey
Let's throw birds at pigs makes a billion dollars and let's put a child into a zombie apocalypse
Moves us to tears so fail faster. You don't even need to have something playable to fail
It doesn't have to be fully baked you don't even need more than words on a page
Start with that first broad pass on what this game will be then hand it
Tell people hey, I'm vetting this for a friend of mine, and I don't think it's very good
But I was hoping to get a second opinion
Just so no one's afraid to be brutally honest with you
Let them [redline] that thing and mark it all up let them just tear it apart bit by bit
[except] the truths that you might be too close [to] see this is how a game goes from sucking to sucking less to being kind
Of okay
I guess to being pretty good to finally becoming great
fail before you even have a line of code a mock up the mechanics on paper try to play it with others as quickly as
You can get your concept art in front of a dozen eyes
Tribe 20 different styles and themes close your eyes and put yourself in the shoes of the player
Imagine yourself playing the game down to the button presses you'll make and watch where it goes wrong
Fail faster get a prototype up as soon as is humanly possible. It doesn't need art. It doesn't need to impress
It needs to be as raw and as open as it can be so you can understand it without being distracted by all the bells
and [whistles]
Play it
Just play it into the ground let everyone else play it you will learn and you will correct and you'll do so before it costs
You greatly because the later you fail the more expensive your failures will be to correct and so the less likely you'll be to correct
them so
Fail faster your ideas can't be precious your ego can't need
Protecting you have to understand that the only thing that matters is the game you ship not any of the steps along the way
Every failure is an opportunity for betterment every failure is another chance to get it, right
Don't give these away out of fear or Shyness fail faster because failing is how we get it right?