“Trust your gut” is the worst advice for a Game Designer.

Let’s face the truth. The game industry keeps changing fast, and if you don’t keep yourself up to date, you’re doomed to fail as a game designer.

Hold on, though; I’m not talking about industry trends or whatever. Let’s leave them to the enthusiasts who can’t resist the FOMO. I’m talking about something more profound and crucial for your game design career: your design process.

If you still rely on a trial-and-error approach where you:

• Come up with an idea
• Create a prototype
• Test it to see if it’s “fun”

… I’m afraid you’re in big trouble, my friend.

You’re essentially working like at least 30 years ago. The world around you has changed, but you haven’t realized it yet.

In this blog post, I’ll give you a brief history of game design and explain what brought you here.

Get ready to discover why relying on intuition, gut feelings, and “finding the fun” brings you to the edge of a cliff and what you need to avoid to fall into it.

The Game Industry Was Ruled By Game Programmers

We are in the 80s and 90s.

Even if you were young or not born yet, you know videogames were the next big thing. Technology was ramping up quickly, and games followed. The new PC and the Home Console were the perfect present for a kid who couldn’t wait to brag to his friends.

Looking back to those years from now, designing games seemed to be a crucial aspect.

However, the truth was the exact opposite. Now widely known Game Designers like Shigeru Miyamoto, Hironobu Sakaguchi, Hideo Kojima, Will Wright, Sid Meier, etc. were not considered much. At least not how you would expect from such game design giants. They became relevant after the 2000s when the mindset around game design changed a lot.

The ones who gained a bit of fame were not game designers. They did it because they were also programmers.

And here we are with the core mindset of this era.

Game design discipline didn’t actually exist, and programmers dominated the scene.

You might wonder why. The reason is simple and has 100% to do with technology.

Games were much smaller than they are now, and they were created by tiny teams. Often just one or two people. Computers at the time couldn’t do better than that at affordable costs. Pretty much always, teams were full of programmers, whose role quickly became synonymous with game development.

The one game designer we idolize nowadays was just the guy who couldn’t write code back in the day. That was it.

Game Designers were not necessary because programmers could easily do their job.

That’s why there was no actual design process.

Everything was done “at the moment” with a huge amount of trial and error. Implementation was king, and games were tiny, so you could just try out your idea and see how it went.

What about documentation? Don’t make me laugh! Of course, it was barely needed and often more for bureaucratic purposes than design ones. Everything could fit in the programmer’s head. You could easily imagine that, in such an environment, a game designer does not have much to do.

When present, game designers were never considered the main role of the team. They were outlines and mostly out of place.

But as we’ll see in a moment, things start to change pretty quickly at the end of the millennium.

The Complexity Growth Brings To Specialization

Towards the 2000s and a couple of decades in, the industry profoundly changed.

In particular, I'm talking about the size and complexity of the games being developed. Games became bigger with lots of stuff in them and also more intricate with a ton of different things to do. And, again, this didn't happen because someone one day woke up and wanted it. It's about technology.

More powerful microprocessors and dedicated graphic cards for both PC and Home Consoles became the standard. This allowed developers to do more complex things.

What's interesting is not just the technological change per sé but its consequences.

First, programmers slowly started to back off on the importance scale.

The fast increase in the game's size and complexity gave game designers a new life. Someone specialized in managing such complexity was needed.

Game design as a discipline planted its seeds in the previous era, but it started to grow right here. Of course, even in previous years, you would need design, but it was embedded in programming and not something of its own. This, in general, splits the role of a game developer into many specific sub-roles.

So, the teams began to grow in size as well.

Game engines, one of the most impactful technologies in the game industry, drove and enhanced the growth of both games and teams. Nowadays, we tend to underestimate this absolute genius software architecture because that's a given standard.

But they were indeed something special at the end of the 90s. They allowed many people to jump-start a project with standardized working architecture without reinventing the wheel every time. Along with them came the need for a lot more people to develop such big projects.

This, in turn, made the costs skyrocket (and we are still in the long tail of that right now). Ultimately, teams became more complicated to manage, so project managers came to solve the issue and increase the chance of reaching the project completion.

This fast expansion of the market changed people's perspective on game development.

Games started to be much more than their technical aspects. An "experience awareness" arises, and game designers push this perspective more often. Nothing is standardized yet, but there is more conscious effort in designing how the player interacts with the game.

The game medium flourishes in all its possibilities.

This brings us to today.

As you can see and probably witnessed yourself, the past decade was one of great expansion and growth. It's a good thing for an industry but comes with dangerous cons.

This is why today we're in a bit of a transition. We still need to formalize what happened in the past two decades, but technology is still moving fast. And it will go faster, especially with that powerful Generative AI springboard.

To this extent, analyzing where the current motion is heading is crucial if you want to lead instead of being dragged away.

So, let's look at how game design is changing and what this means to you and your career.

The Game Industry Is Ruled By Game Designers

Let's start with a fact that we're all witnessing right now.

Implementing things is getting faster and easier every day. I know your mind goes right to Artificial Intelligence and its increasing capabilities.

That's true, but AI is just the last big innovation, not the only one carrying this technological progress. Let's think of new and more powerful versions of Game Engine like Unreal Engine 5 and Unity DOTS. Or the constant updates and new feature releases of 3D modeling software like Maya and Blender. There's also the hardware, which keeps improving performance every year. I mean, you get it.

We're moving towards a scenario like: "With the right technology, you can do almost anything you can think of". You're surrounded by technological improvements that make implementing designs easier than ever.

Ok, fine, but what about game design?

That's where things can get complicated for you. It depends on how you choose to behave in the face of what will happen. But before diving into that, let's see how the current trend in game design leads us.

Game Design is slowly becoming the most important thing in game development.

If you think about it, everything follows right from the technological fact I talked to you about a moment ago. Sure, a more capable tool (even AI) doesn't make designing a game easier per sé. You still need to choose the game structure and features. However, technology shifts the focus from implementation to ideation.

Iteration cycles become faster and faster since functional prototypes can be created with a few clicks. This allows you to test things quicker and spend more time thinking about their structure (which is the actual design work).

The game design process as a whole will speed up.

This is great but comes with something else that can hurt you.

Game development has become accessible to many more people than ever before. And yes, there will be AI-made games, but don't worry, it won't end the world. It's just a natural change as any other in history. What you need to manage is the vast amount of games released every day.

The massive number of them is already a problem; imagine it being 10 times worse than now. This opens up many more possibilities but also makes it harder to differentiate yourself professionally.

We're at the start of the "Game Designer Era".

I'm not saying that other game dev roles, such as artists and programmers, are marginal or unimportant. They're crucial because they make the game concrete and playable. If this is not a critical role, I don't know what is. However, the situation from back in the day is slowly reversing. The Game Designer is becoming synonymous with game development, just as the programmer was in the 80s and 90s.

When implementation is accessible to anyone, the structuring of the game becomes the most important thing. It needs more refined and deep skills since no technological process replaces it.

The difference between a kid and a pro is no longer a matter of the available tools but of their skills.

This is where you come into play.

You could think that facing a scenario like that is a piece of cake for you as a game designer. History is in your favor, and you just need to follow its good fortune.

If you do, you can't be more wrong than that. Yes, this is a positive trend for game designers. Especially when it comes to Generative AI, despite some fools screaming the end of the world by making unnecessary psychological terrorism.

However, there's a piece missing from this puzzle that can cause you to fall apart like a deck of cards if you don't fix it right now.

The Future Has No Place For Trial-And-Error

As I showed you in the previous sections, the game industry has changed a lot.

Many things have come and gone, and the future holds many exciting innovations. However, one thing has not changed much.

Game Design. Yeah, you read it right. You can make all the faces you want, but that doesn’t make the truth disappear. Apart from the technology around it, the way we design games is still deeply trial-end-error-based.

Many people think there can’t be a different approach to game design.

They told you that theoretical knowledge is useless, there are no standards, and you can only learn it through practice. That’s why their only advice for you is to “be passionate and make games”.

If you believe that just doing games will, one day, magically turn you into a game designer, go ahead. But be ready to feel lost and overwhelmed by the sheer amount of contradictory and fuzzy information online. Be ready to design games without actually knowing what you’re doing.

You’ll just come up with an idea and try it out to see if it works and if it’s “fun” (don’t let me start on that, please). They call it “intuition” to feel themselves clever, but I call it randomness.

The truth is that most game designers work like in the 90s.

They blindly follow their gut feelings without actually knowing what they’re doing. They don’t have a solid Game Direction; they just follow a ghost none can define called “fun”.

Do you a favor and do this test for a game designer to discover his mindset. Ask him to describe step-by-step what he does before reaching the prototyping stage. He will probably answer with a generic “brainstorming stage”.

Dig deeper and ask what exactly he thinks about between brainstorming and prototyping. Some will tell you they do nothing; others will mix some fuzzy words to describe essentially nothing.

At this point, you’ll see discomfort in their faces.

They’ll probably feel like idiots, but they’re not. They are tough people who do one of the most challenging yet rewarding jobs in the world. They just can’t explain to you how they achieve their results because they just “feel them”.

However, history has spoken pretty loudly.

In the future, trial and error will be out of the question. Making games until you “feel them right” is not a game design process.

The world is a train running on a high-speed rail called technology. If you don’t learn how to run on those rails, you have no chance to keep up with the train. Games will become more complex and intricate than ever (and they already are!), and you can’t become a kick-ass game designer by guessing.

You have no hope of being interesting to game companies or other professionals in the game industry. They search for analytical brains who can reason with and find solutions to real design problems.

Do you see now the danger of the advice “Be passionate and make games”?

It’s not to say that practice is useless (that’s the other extreme, and that’s stupid too!). I’m telling you that you won’t learn a thing by just making games because you don’t know what you’re doing.

But you’ll fall into an even more dangerous and reinforcing pattern! You trick yourself into believing that you already know everything. You already have what you need to become a game designer because you’re a passionate gamer and just need to practice.

I’m sorry, but I need to tell you the harsh truth. You lack a professional analytical thinking process to turn an idea into structured gameplay.

But here it comes where I feel you.

I’ve been a passionate gamer, too.

When you make your first moves into the realm of game design, it’s natural to think that practice makes perfect. Especially in a field that feels so hands-on.

In fact, in some instances, this is true. But there’s a catch missing that no one tells you when giving this suggestion. You learn from your mistakes only when you know what you’re doing. If you grope in the dark, you won’t even see your mistakes, so you can’t learn anything from them.

You just become frustrated when, despite your efforts, you don’t feel like you can solve design problems. And the worst part is that the more you keep yourself in that mud, the more you let passion die out.

But I know it’s not your destiny to drown in that.

I’ll tell you this one more time because I want you to focus on it. The future of game design is analytical.

You must develop the right competencies to avoid falling into the “guess-working pit” where you make decisions based on gut and intuition. You must transform into an Analytical Game Designer and start thinking like a professional. The standard lesson from the past is that it will repeat itself.

You can’t change the world (technology does), but you can 100% take your turn and gain an edge over others.

When the future becomes the present, you’ll be ready to thrive.