coding on the games you ship. Indeed, I originally pursued programming because I
wanted to design computer games. It is beyond the scope of this book to actually teach
you to program, and there are certainly plenty of books available to help you learn what
you will need to work on games. Much of effective programming is a matter of disci-
pline. And you do not even need to be a terribly good programmer to have it help your
design out immensely. Indeed, almost all the designer/programmers I know will insist
that they are not very good programmers, but that they are persistent enough to get
what they want out of their games. As I have mentioned, knowing how to program will
give you a better sense of what is easy to do in a game and what is hard, and program-
mers will respect you for attempting to better understand their side of game
development. Furthermore, learning how to program will help teach you how to think
logically and abstractly, a talent of vital importance to both programmers and game
designers.
Of course, with modern projects and fifty-person development teams, it is often
difficult to be both a designer and a programmer, simply due to the amount of time
designers will need to spend on their own work and conveying their vision to the team.
If you are not going to be programming on your project, it is essential that you have a
lead programmer with a good sense of gameplay, someone whose opinion you can trust.
Indeed, you will be well advised to only have programmers on your team who have a
good sense of what makes games fun. In the end, there are an infinite number of small
decisions that programmers make that will have a profound impact on the gameplay,
details that no designer can anticipate. These little details have an enormous impact on
the final game and determine how the game “feels” to play. Often, unmotivated or disin-
terested lead programmers can be found to be behind games that seem like good ideas
in theory but just do not turn out to be any fun. Many projects have gone from promising
starts to dissatisfying final products as the result of programmers who merely imple-
ment various features from a specification and never take a moment to look at the
whole game and see if it is any fun.
This book includes interviews with seven people who are indisputably some of
the most talented game designers in the history of the industry. It is interesting to note
that of those seven, all were programmers at one point in their careers and pro-
grammed in some capacity on their most respected games. Indeed, back in the early
days of the computer game industry, the development process was of a small enough
scale that one person was doing all the work, so there was no need to separate the role
of designer and programmer. Nonetheless, several of the interview subjects still serve
as the lead programmer on their own projects. This is not to say that one cannot be a
great designer without being a programmer, but I think designers who are able to pro-
gram have a leg up on those who cannot, an advantage that allows them to make better
games.
When Is It Fun?...............................
Getting your gameplay working is one of the most essential parts of game design, yet it
is also one of the most difficult to try to explain or teach. A lot of the process involves
understanding what is fun about a game in a way that no book can ever explain. Indeed,
a game’s design changes so often during the implementation stage that I do not believe
Chapter 15: Getting the Gameplay Working 293