When bored I'm doing what everyone else is - watching youtube videos. So I was watching this presentation by Scott Meyers (the author of Effective C++ book series) titled 'The Most Important Design Guideline'. I haven't read any of Effective books and I usually don't like these talkative guys, but he did say something interesting that made me realize something.
He is talking about the importance of designing programs to people. He mentions that if the user can't understand easily how to use the program it's not his fault, it's the designers fault. It's kind of obvious reasoning, but actually not that often thought in game design. Roguelikes for sure are notorious for having cryptic user interface solutions.
From that realization I had an idea to approach development from the design point of view. I've never thought of it that way, even I know design is important. But it can be even more, a motivation that drives the development. It's important to have motivation and it can go away when you spend years in developing something. For example Kaduria has practically removed my interest to play games. So finding another source of motivation is nice. It feels nice, that's all I can say.
This new motivation for design has already made a difference in the way I'm programming. I'm now focusing more on important stuff like content which can be seen as design. It also helps me to avoid dwelling in technical details of the source code which is one of my shortcomings in game development.
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