Dev Journal

Too often people consider "game design" as a single, overarching skill that just touches upon other disciplines, when really it's the reverse. It's an activity made of multiple skills. Social interaction analysis, user experience, component design and manipulation, probability and statistical analysis, and so many more go into everything from a simple card or dice game to a board game so large it makes your dining room table beg for mercy.

When it comes to skills, practitioners usually fall into one of two camps: the specilist, and the generalist. Specialists focus on a single skill and can achieve incredible levels of ability. Generalists like to learn a lot of different skills to varying degrees, and use a combinations of skills to make up for their lack of focus.

I don't hold that either camp is necessarily wrong, but I don't think they're exactly right, either. In my experience, a blending of specialized and generalized skills can lead to incredible outcomes. Back when I was a cyclist, people would ask, "How do you get fast?" My answer: RTDB - "Ride the Damned Bike." By this, I meant regardless of specific, focused training, just putting in the time on the bike will make you faster. Doing it again and again will make you better. The same holds true for game design and the various skills it requires: the more you learn to play with card quantities and dice variations, the more you'll understand how probabilities can affect game play and outcome. The more rule books you write, the tighter your rule explanations become.

But here's the big thing: each one of those skills is not done in isolation. By all means, they can be: an artist who draws cards for a game may just be an artist. They may not design games at all. However, the more they understand the various game types they're drawing for, the more they know how to shape their art to support the gameplay, or mechanics, or vibe.

By touching more of the various skills, you are widening your focus and understanding of this highly complex thing we call game design. By leaning how to do layouts for a board or a card or a rule book, you start to understand more about how the players will absorb and experience those rules and the game. Which in turn will make it easier for you to build better layouts and rules.

Often times I found the best cyclists weren't only cyclists: they were often also runners, or lifted weights, or they did yoga. It all came down to cross training: a term we see all the time in athletes, but not as often in creative endeavors. While cycling worked on a very specific set of muscles, running and weight lifting allowed these people to strengthen muscles that weren't the primary drivers in cycling. By strengthening those secondary muscles, it offloaded some of the work from the primary ones, which made them even faster.

The same can be said about game design and creative arts in general. You will get better at game design simply by designing more games. However, if you spread out and work on things like creative writing, drawing, painting, programming, and so on, all of these other creative disciplines will help support your primary aim: better game design. I'm not saying that if you run off and write a book or draw an incredible painting, you'll ace game design. But I am saying that it will definitely make you a stronger game designer to understand more about all the various skills that go into this.

Think of it like this: one way to build a tall tower of blocks is to just stack them up one by one. However, once you lean slightly out of that tower's vertical alignment, stability falls off rapidly. Laying blocks side by side on the ground made them very stable, but gives you very little height in the long run. But combining these two processes: building up while also building out, like a pyramid, gives you both height and stability. Not as high as the tall, thing tower, but much more stable. Not as stable as the squat, flat tower, but much taller.

All this is to say, every now and then, consider taking a day to focus not on your games or game design per se, but on a single skill, or maybe even a different discipline entirely can supports one of the skills we use in game design. Take a day and try to write a short story. Maybe pick up a pencil and try to sketch something. Maybe read up on how humans perceive probabilities, or learn more about what makes a certain visual appearling. Heck, ultimately we have to get our games out into the world, so learning how to build creatives for marketing.

Some will say, "Hey, if I'm not designing my game, then I'm wasting time." But I beg to differ. If you build up skills that can help support your game designs, it's never a waste of time. And there's one other huge bonus behind branching out artistically: it allows your mind to rest. Just like how different physical activitivites train different muscles, they also allow other muscle groups to rest. The mind is the same way: if you do too much of the same thing over and over, it wears down. Switching to another disciplie - even for a short time - can give you mind a chance to rest, while also strengthening it along another branch.

So go out there, hit pause on your game for a day, and try something new. You'll may be surprised about skills you didn't know you had, or how much better your games become once you bring in a little creative cross training.