When You Get Stuck on a Game Design

Sometimes you won’t know exactly what to do next on a game. You could use your game design time to think on what to do and it’s good to do so, but you don’t want to do so for an excessive amount of time. Here’s a variety of things that you can do to try to figure out where to go next with one of your designs.

Be open to getting feedback.
— This could be playtesting your game with others, making a print and play and getting opinions that way, or just talking through the issue with other designers.
— Make sure to take in all the feedback you get. You don’t have to make any changes based on the feedback, but hearing what players think are problems often can lead you to what the real problem is or can give you ideas on changes you can make. Having a direction to go in is a ton better than being stuck, even if the directions aren’t the right ones.

Have another design to fall back on.
— If you’re stuck on one design, working on a different project could be just what you need to get ideas and inspiration for your first design.
— Going between two designs means you can learn something from one of them that you can incorporate in the other or you can use something that failed in the first design in the second.

Help out someone else by playtesting their game
— Taking a break works wonders, but you could also be inspired by others to see what they’ve done or to think about what you’d change about their design.

Simply play others games
— I’ve been equally inspired by games I like and games I don’t like. After being a game designer for awhile, I can’t really turn off the game design part of me when I play a game and I think about all the things I would change to make the game really mine. Just going through this exercise with a few games can remind you what things you like in games and what your personal design style is like.

Make content or make lists of what you know
— Writing this blog and making videos about publishing and game design and has been really helpful to me. I prepare by making lots of lists of information pertaining to a certain subject and by making that list, I remind myself of how I’ve done things in the past which can tell me how to solve a problem now.
— This might not pertain to you, if you’re really good at remembering things, but it’s a way to help out the community that can have surprising benefits for you. I mean, worst case scenario, you’re now a content creator or you have a list you can reflect on later. That’s a pretty good worse case scenario!

It’s ok to leave a game on the shelf for a bit.
— Not all of your ideas are going to be great and that’s fine! If you can’t motivate yourself to fix a game now, you can move on from it and pick it back up when you’ve had a break and spent some time with other designs.
— I’ve had a number of games that I’ve made prototypes for and I intend to get back to at some point, even if I take a break for a few years. I like to focus my time on the games that I’m the most passionate about as I’m way more likely to not procrastinate while working on them and progress will be faster.

Remember, no game is a failure! As long as you learned something by creating a game, you’ve been successful, even if that game doesn’t go beyond being a hand crafted prototype.

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