Being Brutal with Ideas

It can be hard to let go of parts of your game and move on. You feel like the game just couldn’t survive without it and even considering cutting it is horrifying.

But this is a devastating mistake. You need to be ready to let your ideas die instead of your game.

If a feature is constantly giving problems and you can’t think of a way to deal with the problems, and those problems are crippling the fun of the game, there is only one choice. Cut it. If your game needs that feature to be worth playing, and that feature is ruining the fun no matter what you do, then your game is doomed. The only winning solution is cut the feature and maybe salvage the game. Maybe you’re mistaken in what the game needs to be fun, maybe there will be a way of making it work without that feature or you’ll find a completely different better way of implementing it. The game mechanics are less important than the Game Idea.

Then, once you’ve tried cutting it, if your game is ruined by removing the feature and you still have no ideas for how to proceed? Move on.

Maybe you’ll come back to it some day, in a year or in a decade, maybe you’ll see the solution at that time. Maybe you’ll have learned something that helps you solve the problem and move forward.

But keeping forward on a game that is fundamentally broken is just an exercise in futility. Trying to argue that you’ve already invested so much into it and can’t give up is called a sunk cost fallacy.

This isn’t just applicable to game design though. This has reach to life in general. If your ideas are killing you, let them die in your place.

Game design philosophy