Objectives and Constraints for Game Creation

“Problems that take years to solve are problems worth solving” - dan goldfield

Our First Value

Our first value is continuous improvement.

We’re only successful if we learn from each published game and refine our approach to:

1. Make the next game better
2. Serve customers better
3. Improve our skills

This means we must be a thesis-driven company. This document is our living thesis about how to make games.

Continuous improvement is easy to say, but hard to do. It requires like-minded partners, so we seek them out and adopt strategies toward it.

Key Assumptions

Our goal is to make exceptional games. By definition, they’re rare and hard to make, because “exceptional” is relative to the competition, and there are a lot of determined competitors who are always improving, and always trying to be exceptional. Two things prevent it:

1. Not enough understanding. We believe that by being thesis-driven, and repeatedly updating our thesis, we can bridge this gap. We develop our theses through:
   1. playtests, especially split-tests.
   2. interviews with our customers
   3. analysis of online comments/reviews of our games and others
   4. interviews with game designers we admire
2. Not enough effort. Those who work hardest have the best chance of making exceptional things, all else equal. To this end, we’ll hold ourselves accountable to a standard that can cause discomfort and pain, which others aren’t willing to meet. This requires receiving critical feedback frequently, for long periods, and knowing much of what we make won’t be good enough.

Each of us is accountable for finding a healthy relationship with the resulting discomforts, and maintaining our standard despite them. Hard things are hard.

Jobs Our Games Should Do

Each game we publish should excel at doing the following 5 jobs for our customers: