One thing I’m finding extremely important in game design is the ability to work with constraints. I’ve continuously been seeing all too many young hopefuls like myself striving to create the Next Big Thing That Will Revolutionize The Industry And Gaming As A Whole, and that’s been bugging me a bit. Ambition is nice and all, but these so-called great ideas rarely end up in a concrete, playable form, and that’s far from revolutionary.

Kids, if you ever want to create anything that’s at all useful, you’re going to have to take technology and your own abilities into account. By making my own amateur games, I learned to design according to what I could program, draw, and implement with the tools at my disposal. More recently, working with the folks at Telltale taught me that it takes a hell of a lot of creativity to work with a limited budget and marketplace realities. A lot of people just don’t realise this, assuming instead that the reason nothing new and fresh is coming out of the game industry is because people are unimaginative. I tell you, most professional game designers have more revolutionary ideas than you can shake the projectile-type object of your choice at. They’re just not economically feasible, is all.

And that, my friends, is my incoherent rant of the day. I do hope you found it enjoyable.