3 Gamedev Ideas

Your players can put up with a lot of bugs and issues as long as they enjoy your game.

It means you don’t necessarily have to fix everything before showing it… or even releasing it.

I know that because I’ve been playing Dofus these last weeks, a game that’s been out for more than 15 years.

There are so many broken things in the game: music tracks that play when they shouldn’t (and disabling them works only half the time), memory leaks that force you to restart the game every hour or so, missing animations, an unbalanced matchmaking system…

But it’s still a very successful game with hundreds of thousands of players.

II.

Discipline is not a personality trait. It’s mostly just dependent on your environment.

If you have:

A laggy computer,
People watching Netflix around you all the time
And friends constantly pinging you to join them in the latest MMORPG…

Then it’s only a matter of time before you stop working on your game.

But if you:

Have a great computer,
Live with people that are working on their own projects,
And you’re running out of cash to put food on the table…

Working on your project will be a piece of cake.

III.

I think people that make great games are not unique ultra talented superhumans.

They are just normal people with a greater than average interest for games that have put in the work over a sustained period of time.

Until next week,

Thomas Gervraud,
Developer of Space Gladiators: Escaping Tartarus