System Design Tips
Recently, my friend and fellow dev, Dan Miller ( https://linktr.ee/fraculation ), posted in a Discord server we both hang out in and linked to this Reddit post, The Systems Visionary Trap . Dan lamented his own struggles with getting stuck over-engineering systems games. In my own experience, systems games take longer to develop and “find the fun”. They are harder to pin down in the prototyping phase than something more action-based. A common story from developers who work on big systems games, like 4x strategy games or complicated city sims, is that their games aren’t fun until very late in development, when every planned system is working together. Unfortunately, as indies, we often don’t have the luxury to take that long for our games to be fun. To succeed, we need to build small-scope games that are easy to grok and offer something novel. That requires finding the fun quickly in the prototyping phase of development. I think it is a mistake to describe The Systems Visiona...
