Now what?

John Carmack on making games

Lots of solid advice from John Carmack (of id fame) in an old Slashdot thread:

“There is not a hell of a lot of difference between what the best designer in the world produces, and what a quite a few reasonably clued in players would produce at this point. This is the “abstract creativity” aspect. This part just isn’t all that valuable. Not worthless, but it isn’t the thing to wrap a company around.”

“The real value in design is the give and take during implementation and testing. It isn’t the couple dozen decisions made at the start, it is the thousands of little decisions made as the product is being brought to life, and constantly modified as things evolve around it.The focus should be on the development process, not the (initial) design.”

“The games with 500 page design documents before any implementation are also kidding themselves, because you can’t make all the detail decisions without actually experiencing a lot of the interactions.”