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“Don’t take pride in your game. Take pride in yourself as a designer. It doesn’t matter how many times you rebuild it; it matters that you’re learning and building skills: both general skills and the skill of designing that specific game.”
— Jay Treat
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“Every design success is just the latest iteration in a series of design failures.”
— Seth Jaffee
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“As game designers we focus a lot on components, mechanics, & systems. But learning to teach your game well helps attract more play testers & also reveal unnecessary complexities. Be intentional about how you teach, and iterate on it just as you would with your design.”
— Joseph Z. Chen
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“I cannot stress enough that if you are a first time designer you should try to start small & simple rather than big & complicated. Larger designs have many interacting systems that are much harder to design, troubleshoot, & playtest. Then try something bigger after.”
— C.M. Perry
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“The more I create, the more I develop the skill of persistence. I see people “give up” so easily, convinced that a problem is unsolvable, resigning themselves to a flaw in their work that they see as unavoidable. With very rare exceptions, there’s ALWAYS a solution. Find it.”
— Peter C. Hayward
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“You’re going to have bad playtests, bad feedback, lack of solutions to problems, and especially lack of time. Take feedback for what it is and try something different. Most importantly: Don’t stop trying.”
— Lock Watson
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“Theme can inspire game design, but you have to be sure it doesn’t tie your hands. During development, you might discover that you need to alter a mechanism to make the game better. It’s hard to make that change if it goes against the theme.”
— Vladimír Suchý