Designing Games — 21 best pieces of advice taken from the book

When I read a book, I often underline useful passages. Later when I am finished reading the book, I compile a summary of these important lines.

I am an Unreal Engine 5 game developer and this is 21 quotes from the book written by Tynan Sylvester, an INTP millionaire gamedev. I searched for INTP gamedev writers and this book was appraised by many. I used the money that my dying grandfather gave me as a Christmas gift to buy this book. My memento of his soul lives in my copy of the book. Let his will flow through my future gamedev ideas.

1. These situations can be kept more interesting by not telling players everything, and instead rationing out information in a structured way to create suspense.
2. The true parts of these statements (feedback from testers) are the raw emotions behind “I liked it” and “It wasn’t fun”
3. So games that teach players to build, socialize, and fight will always have the broadest impact (values that shift loneliness to togetherness and poverty to wealth)
4. To achieve sustained success, a game must use its new technology to unlock interactions and situations that could not have been experienced before (example: Doom)
5. Games narratives are laden with clichés. The player character is an amnesiac. Or a super-soldier. One of the worst clichés is the crate (loot crate, they use the Start to crate metric as metric for bad games)