3 Projects for Beginners: Game Design and Art Fundamentals

0:00 There's something I've been wanting to show you for a while. Regular watches of this channel will know I used to run a game design course at a university in the UK. Teaching at university level, teaching a degree, is a bit different from teaching at other levels because you sort of have to design the whole course yourself. It's going to vary from country to country, but in sort of high school there's in the UK at least there's a national curriculum and if people are learning a particular subject they they learn the same thing and it's set up nationally. The teacher may vary how they teach it and what things they use and so on, but at university level it's really up to the staff at the university to decide what to teach and how to teach it. And although that kind of gets externally verified by assessors and stuff, you're you're sort of you're not just teaching, you're you're designing the teaching. And you know, I'd been working in games before that. I'd worked in a mobile studio for a couple of years and I'd also made my own games for years and years and years, like basically since I was 9 or 10. I've been messing around with different ways of making games, both video games and board games.

1:07 And what I want to take you through is some projects that we used to give students to do on our game design course in the first year. Now, this wasn't the first thing they did. It was like the second half of the first year, so they'd already had an introduction to some sort of some programming concepts and some artistic concepts. And you know, it's a game design course and as you will hear me go on and on about game design isn't necessarily about computer science and it's not necessarily about what your game looks like. When I talk about game design as a game designer, I'm talking about the design of the gameplay and the interactive element. But in order to teach game design you have to teach general development as well, otherwise all anyone can do is just write game design documents and analysis of games and they can't really make anything. So, we would start off by teaching people the basics of sort of entry-level programming, not to become programmers, but so that they could at least carry out some of their game design ideas. And we would do some basic artistic things like graphic design basics everyone should know. And kind of pitching and how to talk about ideas and stuff like that. And then in the second half of the year, we had this longer module where students had to do three mini projects.

2:20 And what I want to do today is take you through those mini projects and the sort of rationale we had behind teaching that way. And I'm kind of excited because I reached out to one of my old students on LinkedIn. Really good student, doing really well now. has sort of banded together with a with a team of other alumni and it is working on an indie game at the moment. And I asked, "Can I have your portfolio from that module so I can talk people through the exercises that we did?" And he's very kindly sent that over. I want to take you through this this kind of introductory game development game design module that myself and my colleague John put together for our first-year students. And I want to take you through what we taught and why we taught it, why we asked the students to do the things we asked them to do. And I think if you're just getting into game development or you're thinking about getting into it, have a think about some of the rationale here and the sort of projects you might give yourself to do in order to learn certain things. The other thing to bear in mind is that when you're teaching at university, you get a large volume of students who have not done the subject before at all. And that might sound strange if you're like a hobbyist, you're teaching yourself how to make games to think that people would sign up for tens of thousands of pounds worth of debt to do a course in something they'd never done before.

3:38 But, you know, it may vary from country to country, but certainly in the UK, there's definitely a culture of encouraging everyone to go to university at age 18. And what that means is lots of people assume they're going to go to university and then they just apply for the course that sounds the least boring to them, right? So, you get lots of people apply for popular subjects like game design, game development, who don't necessarily have any background in it.

4:01 So, we had, you know, one small group of students who had some background in the technical aspects of making games, maybe another smaller group who understood some stuff about making art and like drawing characters or doing some sort of animation or something from the courses they'd done before, and I would say a considerably large group who had never done either of those things. And we had to try and create something that catered to all of them. So, in the module that I'm going to show you some of the work from, we were trying to teach like the basics of visual design, the basics of game specific game programming, and also game design fundamentals as well. And when I say game design fundamentals, I would say the main one here is like the link between the mechanics and the theme of the game. When you pick a theme for a game, how do you make sure that players are going to look at the art on screen and look at the fact that that's a spaceship or that's a farm, and sort of understand what they need to do in order to interact with the game. That's the sort of thing that in a in the first year, I would be very focused on.

5:04 Our alumnus who has very kindly lent us their portfolio. I'm just going to be zooming in at key points of it to talk about what he was doing. I'm going to call him JR because he's another Joe, and it's very confusing if I call him Joe. So, I'm going to call him JR and talk about what these these projects represent. So, the first project that I gave students to do, and this is going to sound mean because it's not necessarily that fun, was a virtual pet. And by virtual pet, I mean something like a Tamagotchi, if you remember those from the '90s. If you don't remember those, you might remember mobile games like Talking Tom, where there's a little character there and you have to feed them and and look after them and stuff.

5:46 And all they had to do was create a character that had three needs and like three interaction buttons that would, you know, feed those needs in some way. And then have different visual states for the character. So, if your needs were being cleaned, being fed, and being played with, they're they're like the basic virtual pet needs, right? Then there would be a state that the pet can get into, which is dirty, a state which is bored, and a state which is hungry.

6:15 And then for the visual element, they would have to design what that character looks like in all of those different states, right? You will notice here as well that it is in monochrome, and that was my colleague, John, his kind of constraints on this first game were that it had to be two colors, and it had to be made up of basic shapes. And this was again to get the students who had no background in art to start from the fundamentals, right? We're not starting with realistic depictions of like a cat that looks like a real cat or a person that looks like a real person. We're starting from real basics of how are shapes put together to make a cartoon character?

6:53 because if you jump that, if you skip that and try and go straight into making things that look like real things, you're often you're going to make things that look a bit derpy, to be honest. And it's often better to start in a sort of very stylized place and work with the fundamentals, and you're more likely to make something that is visually appealing if you start from there. And because this was meant to be a design module and not a programming module, in GameMaker, I very much sort of gave them on-rails tutorials of like, this is how I would build this thing. So, you can see slides of evidence where the student has just put in their portfolio, you know, showing what they did. And in terms of of how this kind of work was graded, the portfolios often have a lot of reflective writing in them. And if you've ever been to college or university and done a practice-based course in the arts or something technical and had to do loads of reflective writing. I know it can be very frustrating, but there is a reason for it. And the reason for it is so that your work, when it gets assessed, when it gets graded, that you we make sure you are graded on what you have learned.

7:54 If we ask you to make something or do some kind of technical or artistic process, and then we just grade the outcome of like how good that final thing is, then what we're actually marking you for, grading you for, is just how good you were in the first place, rather than what you specifically have learned. And as I said, we have students coming into courses who are all sorts of different levels, you know, you might have someone who's already sat down and done 3 years of tutorials and made their own games at home, and then other people who have no technical or artistic background. And you need a way to be able to grade what each individual has learned, which is why there is such a strong emphasis on reflective writing in in college portfolios. So, I'm not going to show a lot of that cuz I I told JR I'd just be showing images of his work to talk through the projects, but these portfolios have a lot of reflection. And And the point about reflection is it's not just you saying what you did, it's saying what you found hard, you know, what you're going to do differently next time you approach this kind of problem. That's where the evidence of learning lies, not in just describing, you know, I made some sprites. I made one sprite for the cleaning button. I made one sprite for the feeding button. That's not reflective, that's just descriptive.

9:07 Look at this guy. He's like an angry loaf of bread. And you can see that this is kind of teaching the students to start with placeholder as well. So, we've got a clean, a feed, and a play button, and they're very clearly labeled with the letters, and the sprite state of the character is labeled with idle. You can also see the students were required to develop two states for their buttons. And on this channel, I quite frequently see games where the interface buttons do not have an up and a down state, so you click on a button and nothing is there to indicate that you've clicked it in.

9:39 still see that in like games that people have spent a very long time on. I think this is like the bare minimum you need to have in your button interactions. This is the stuff I love to see. So, this was like a homework task where the students went away and thought through what their pet could be. And I I I think I deliberately tasked them with, you know, what's the most unusual thing that you can make this into that is a you know, a thing with three needs that you need to care for. They need to still be visually communicable.

10:09 But, it's not allowed to be a normal household pet. And it can't just be an exotic pet like a snake or a parrot either. I want you to change it to something else. And this is kind of introducing them to the idea that you can take a game genre and you can re-theme it and it becomes dramatically different, right? When we think of sort of care games like a Tamagotchi or Nintendogs, we tend to think of a young audience or we tend to think of a a feminine audience, right? They are have historically been marketed as that thing. But, there is no reason why you can't make the same genre of game and make it like a demon or a Terminator or something like that. So, we were kind of introducing the idea of like subverting the theme, the the expected theme of a game genre very early on. And in order to do this, I set this homework where I was like, "Go away and come up with a couple of things that your pet could be and then tell me what the three needs would be changed to here. And then what would the action be to fulfill that, right? Cuz if we've got these three interaction buttons and like cleaning makes the the pet happy in one way, playing with it makes it happy in another way, what are those actions going to be replaced to so that they relate to these three needs? This is starting to get us to think about the game variables and what they represent and like what verbs the player has in order to interact with them. Now, I know one of the things you might be thinking is this game doesn't sound very fun. It is just three variables that go down and then you interact with you press a button and they go back up again. And yeah, the game itself is not going to be very fun. It's a very very limited game with very very limited interaction. But part of the point of this project was to teach students about interface. People tend to be very over ambitious when they first get into making games in the area of interface. What I mean by this is if you're inspired by Stardew Valley and you sit down and you say I'm going to make a farming game or you're inspired by JRPGs and you sit down and think I'm going to make a a game in that style, the thing you tend to take for granted is how much interface there is in order to develop a lot of the kind of genre necessities of that type of game, right?

12:19 So, if you want to have dialogue and characters talk to you and text boxes pop up, if you're a new programmer, that's weeks and weeks and weeks of programming. It's weeks and weeks of learning out how how to get the system to to throw up a box and put text in it. Assuming you're doing it from scratch, which a lot of the time you should be if you want to know how to do it properly. And if you throw dialogue choices into that and remembering characters remembering what you said and stuff, that's even more.

12:45 And if you throw an inventory system into that, that's even more. And we take all of these systems for granted. We take all of these very interface heavy systems for granted. So, one of the reasons why this was one of the first projects they were asked to do was it is a game that is purely interface. And there is a character there, but you're interacting with them very indirectly through reading these variables and pressing these buttons. The goal of this is not to produce a fun game.

13:12 The goal of this is to help students to understand how costly specking in a feature with an interface is, right? Because, you know, it would take us a a week or two of lessons just to get to the point where we had these buttons working properly and those those needs bars at the top of the screen drawing properly. Bearing in mind that things like drawing a bar, there's stuff like percentile math that again, if people come without that math skill and they don't understand that the mathematical parts of programming logic, they're going to struggle with that. So, you need to create sort of learning projects which really break that down. I'm telling you this anecdotally as a here's what we did and why we did it, but if you're thinking about projects for yourself cuz you're about to start making games or even if you're already making your games and you're you know, you're working on a very long project and you want to take a break and doing some do something much simpler, then I think this type of project, not necessarily this exact project, but this type of project, i.e. a game which is purely interface where you are not directly interacting with the the fictional game world. You see the game world through some sort of window and all of your interactions are clicking buttons in an interface. That is an incredibly good learning project because it separates out all of the design and implementation of an interface. So, you're not trying to learn how to do all those skills in the context of a bigger game and like breaking everything in your game because you've you've made a little action game and then a month later you're trying to put an inventory system into it and you're and you're breaking everything. It it's just like a kind of mini project to get you to understand how whatever game engine you're doing does interface and to think about like the things that you need to do in order to make that have like the base level of quality, which in my mind is is stuff like icons that are clearly legible on buttons, buttons that have proper states for when they're pressed and not pressed, all of these sorts of things. Whenever you're designing a game and you're ideating around a game and you think of a a menu or an interface, you need to factor in the the fact that that is not going to be a good piece of your game. It's not going to be a good thing for people to interact with unless you meet their expectations of what the quality of of that kind of interface should be. Within the same project, that same virtual pet project, this is one of my colleague John's exercises. I can't take credit for this, but we then set students the task of like creating the art for the pet using just one shape in in various kind of formation. So, part of this is introducing you to the idea that in order to get something good, you make it more than once, right? If you think of the way that a graphic designer works, if a graphic designer's making a logo, for example, they're going to draw dozens and dozens of thumbnails, little tiny versions, rough versions that don't take too long before they decide what to do. You know, if someone's sketching a character, they're going to do rough sketches first until they work out what that character looks like before they kind of commit it to ink and and and make hard decisions that that lock stuff into place. This was that kind of exercise and and they they were asked I think you've you've decided your pet is a cyborg or, you know, it might have been an animate object like a car. I remember someone did a did a power plant. Depict that using just circles.

16:29 Depict it using just triangles and see how far you can get. Starting from the the real fundamentals of of visual language so that you've got somewhere to build up from. I'm not going to show you every single page of this portfolio, but there were there's lots and lots of work gone into this one in particular, but you also have to bear in mind that if you're on a university course, you might only actually be in class for like 12 hours a week and the expectation is that for each hour you a week you do in class, you're doing an additional 2 hours at least outside of it, right? The idea is when you're a student, it's your occupation is a is a 40-hour-a-week job.

17:06 It's the job of kind of lecturers to obviously give you a a class where we we give you stuff to do and make you think about stuff, but the majority of the work on your part as a student is what happens when you're left to your own devices. And JR here is a really good example of a student that like picked up the ball and ran with it and and did everything to it like a really high quality. And you might see some of these sketches and think, "Oh, that doesn't look amazing or whatever." But this is all designed to help people develop their skills often from nothing. It's not there to produce a fantastic end product. It's there to give people all of the little individual skills that they need in order to be able to do that in the future. Here's an example of the same student's like cyborg pet in all the different states. So these didn't necessarily have animations, but it was you know, if you're familiar with the idea of a finite state machine in programming, it's like the character can be in one of these states at any given time. Whichever of its needs are the highest will determine whether it is bored, hungry, or dirty. And then if you interact with it for a short period of time, it's going to be playing, eating, or being cleaned, one of those things.

18:15 They're really characterful. They they some of them almost look like they're in a different art style from the others, but I really like these. They're they're really full of character. Bear in mind what I said earlier about all the all the reasons we gave students to do this. If you are starting out at games, interface can be a really really difficult thing to learn how to do from scratch. And that's why I would always recommend that one of your first small game projects be a game that is purely interface. It doesn't necessarily have to be that same format of a virtual pet with with like three needs and three little health bar type things. It can be any other type of game. It can be something that is a bit more experimental, something from from your head. But making a game where the player's only interaction is clicking buttons in an interface is a really good way to set yourself up to be able to make more complex interface driven games later on like, you know, management sims or RTS's or incremental clickers, all of those sorts of games that require quite a lot of heavy interface work. Now, jumping ahead to the second game that students were asked to do, we asked students to make a sort of side-scrolling shoot 'em up like the old-school shoot 'em ups where you you're just kind of flying a ship along.

19:26 And we repeat some of the principles from earlier on. You've got some very strict rules about what you're allowed to do with the art, what you're allowed to do with the game mechanics. And then in the same way that I asked people to think of a pet that wasn't a pet, we did the same thing with the shoot 'em up. So, you must think of a game that still makes mechanical sense as a shoot 'em up, but in which the player is not allowed to be a spaceship or a plane, right? So, some people did submarines, some people did a witch riding a broomstick. And here we have like a thing with bugs and spiders moving along. And you can see it's moved on in terms of color. We're not just dealing with monochrome black and white now, but we've got you know, gradations of the same color. So, I'm going to jump back a little bit and show you how we got there, but just to put this in the context of this video, remember I showed you the last game to talk about interface and how a good beginner project can be a purely interface-driven game. This is kind of the opposite of that. This is a purely action and motion-driven game that has very little need for an interface. And it also doesn't necessarily require you to make any levels. If we're thinking about, you know, top three genres for beginner game developers, one of those for me after the sort of single-screen interface game would be a single-screen action game. And that could be a schmup, it could be an endless runner like Flappy Bird type thing. But the point is that all of your focus is on the art, the background, the motion and the movement of things, and not necessarily on level design, either. Because if we think of a a schmup or a Flappy Bird, there is stuff coming in and that can change over time and we can make the game gradually harder by, you know, increasing the the rate of certain things, but we're not necessarily having to build an entire environment and do level design. Whereas if you think, you know, loads of people's first game when they sit down and do tutorials, they jump straight to something like a platformer, right?

21:28 Because it's like, oh, I get to make a little character move around in a world and that's what video games are, right? That's where a lot of people will start off and actually doing the level design for a platformer is is relatively difficult. So, what this project does, if you do this or something like it, does Again, it doesn't have to be exactly the same thing, but the principle is to make an action game that happens on one screen, has relatively simple inputs, and doesn't have a requirement for you to build and design a whole environment or lots of different levels that change. So, to jump back to the visual parts of the course that my colleague did, here you can see these early developments of a sort of gradiated single color ideas for a game.

22:10 So, these again, they're not thumbnails in the sense that they're the size of a thumbnail, which is what thumbnail sketches usually are, but it's that same principle of do an exercise lots of times, do them relatively quickly, and then you can sort of look at it and start to see which sorts of shapes and forms and sets of colors appeal to you most and that you want to take forward in in what you're doing. By focusing on just shapes and color and arrangements of those things, we can start to think about issues like legibility, like when you look at these individual images, which bit of the image pops out, right? What color are we going to use to make the the moving elements stand out and be kind of legible against the background?

22:54 All of these sorts of questions. We can start to think about what do the shapes indicate? Which of these shapes look kind of threatening? Do any of the shapes represent something in nature? You know, you see that hexagonal tessellation and you start to think of bees and so on. You get a lot out of just starting from from basic shapes. Basic shapes, basic colors, not getting bogged down with having to combine colors and think about, you know, color adjacency and stuff like that, yeah.

23:20 Just kind of looking at this and starting to develop the theme for the game and thinking about what would be visually appealing before we sort of settle on oh, it's a you know, it's a seagull flying along pooping on people or whatever you whatever you want the game to be thematically, right? So, we In this one, we're kind of developing the visual style and then kind of maybe leaving the theme and the the theming little a bit later on. When it comes to implementing the basic features of the shoot-'em-up, I would spoon-feed a certain amount. I'd say, you know, here's a video of me doing it. Here's some code with some bits missing out for you. Go home and do that. So, the majority of the functionality of this genre was there for the students. But, then I would sort of comment certain things and indicate where they could change stuff. And this is where, again, the design comes back in, the game design, the interaction design, and the link between the interaction design and the programming comes back in. Once students had decided what their theme was, you know, like it's a spider and some flies, and programmed the basic functionality, then they were required to do a single sort of feature specification saying what they would do to add a mechanic or change the game in some way to make it match up with their theme a little bit more. So, once they decided that their game is about a submarine or it's about a spider, you know, what would you tweak about the gameplay to make it feel more like that, right? This is a great way to design. You start off with an abstract game.

24:46 It develops a theme, right? Your shoot-'em-up becomes a game about a spider or a submarine. And then, as that goes along, you start to add tweaks and mechanics to make it feel more like the theme. And I think a lot of us do this naturally anyway. But because again, because this wasn't a technical module that was about how good people were at programming, I basically just asked them to propose that mechanic. And if they wanted to try and put it in themselves, they could. One of the small tweaks I remember stood out quite a bit. It was a very small thing, but made a lot of difference was in another student's game, not JR's, the the submarine game I was mentioning actually. They made it so the torpedoes, when the player shot a torpedo from their submarine, it sort of sped up over time. It came out quite slow and then sped up. And that really made it feel like a torpedo with a little like a propeller driving it along. And that's the kind of thing I'm talking about. Again, I think a lot of us do this naturally. We sort of, you know, make a character is abstract. We decide what the character is and it's like, oh, it's a bear now, so we need to make it feel heavy and sort of slow and sluggish, da da da da da. And there's this kind of back and forth tennis between the game mechanics and the theme that you're doing all the time. I think people who are making games as hobbies, you're probably already doing this. But it was important to introduce it as a as a as a concept for students who didn't naturally pick that up.

26:13 Now, the third and final project was sort of testing all the skills they'd learned so far and also introducing how to work together. So, people were put into pairs and the strongest programmer became the programmer and the other person became like the primary responsible person for the art style. You're going to think that we were really evil for this one. But the But the limitations on this one were that the game had to be set in a specific historical place and time. And what this meant was that you couldn't just immediately go to sci-fi or fantasy or urban stuff with zombies in, which are like the three fallbacks that a lot of people do. By having this constraint of like you've got to pick a specific place and a specific time. You couldn't even just say, "Oh, the Wild West." You would have to pick a particular place. And this would give you something that you could start doing your visual visual research around. And it was all also meant to stimulate you thinking about game mechanics from a kind of more sort of abstract point of view. Now, the game that they had to develop for this this third project is one done in pairs was a single-screen, score-based game.

27:24 Again, it's avoiding the issue of having to design levels. It's kind of combining elements of the previous two games, the sort of the what they know about doing basic action, what they know about doing basic interface and like communicating visually what is going on in their game. We didn't want to necessarily up the ante too much in terms of what people are asked to do in their third game because now they're working in pairs. And the thing about learning to collaborate is it's it's own thing to learn how to do, right? And a lot of people are scared of collaboration. A lot of people hate team projects. And one of the reasons why people hate team projects in in places like college and university so much is that a lot of places don't really teach you how to do it. They just throw you into it. When I was at university, I did a theory-based course. I did media and cultural studies. It was all reading and writing and analyzing things. And the one group project that we did in the three years was just like, "Oh, yeah, you've got to make a presentation. Go off and do it, right?" There was no sitting us down and saying, "Here is how to manage a project. Here is how to split up a workload. Here is how to communicate with each other. Here is how to you know, here's how to disagree on things in a productive way." We taught all that. We focused on it and we made sure that it was explicitly taught because otherwise you're you're disadvantaging people that maybe don't have those soft skills. And like I understand this way too well as someone who grew up autistic and wasn't diagnosed until their late 20s. Like, I know how difficult it is to just be expected to know how to operate in certain circumstances. So, we would make all of those things explicit and I think at this point I started to teach students how to use Trello to manage group projects as well. Very simple Trello Kanban, you know, three three columns. What What's all the stuff we need to do? What's the backlog of all the tasks? Middle column for what we're currently doing, and final column for what's already been done. And I will probably do another video on my approach to using Trello for doing Kanban and project management. So, do let me know if that's interesting to you because it's a boring topic. I don't get excited about thinking about it, but I know it's something that would be helpful for people to learn about. So, if you want to know my approach to that, do leave a leave a comment and let me know cuz then I can focus on it and make sure I get round to that next. But, as I said, when you are teaching people to work as a team, even if it's a small team of two people, you don't want them to have to do too much new stuff. You want the focus to be on how do we collaborate?

29:57 And you want them to have a fun time doing it. So, we had these creative constraints like we always did. The first one was the time and place one. Again, force you away from thinking of zombies, dragons, spaceships. Having to do a little bit of research and kind of looking at historical documents. And this would also give you some kind of visual inspiration as well, right? Because if you're thinking about, oh, this is in a Victorian setting, that is going to change some of your graphic design decisions and sort of the fashion of characters and stuff like that. And it means you you have to base it on something. You can't just freewheel and come up with a a world that doesn't exist, which is is a fun thing and a thing that, you know, most game developers have to do eventually. But, in order to do that effectively, you often need to know how to look at the real world and base things on that because fantasy world, science fiction worlds are based on things that have existed most of the time. So, here we've got I think they decided to put their make their game be set in a arcade in like a old retro arcade. So, we've got all of these initial sketches, just thinking about like the activities that the player character could be doing in these circumstances. And sketching them out as like single images cuz again, this is a single screen game. You're not doing multiple mini games or anything like that. So, you need to be able to think about what can fit on one screen and what is simple enough to fit on one screen and what is too complex. And when you hear the art constraints, you're going to be very annoyed with us. This was my colleague John, but I fully support this one because it it's sort of I put people in a really strange experimental place that they don't expect to go into when they first make games. For the third project, the students had their art on things that they had basically found or made in an analog context. So, what I mean by this is sort of hand-drawn things, you know, claymation. I think some students made little models and took photographs of them. They could scan things in. But, the point was you weren't allowed to make anything from scratch on a computer.

32:03 And this led to some things that were really visually interesting. Obviously, everything looked a bit scrappy because it's new artists working in an unfamiliar medium. This is JR's partner's work who was doing the art. It sort of forces you to go to an extreme, right? which is a great place to go when you're just starting out with something. Because then later on, you know, say let's say you learn Blender or you get really good at illustration. And then you remember that time that you made something out of clay or you scanned a carpet into the computer, whatever. They They're a processes available to you now for making art that a sort of standard illustrator, animator, or 3D artist would just simply not have. And I really like the sort of free creativity that this sort of process encourages. And I I guess if we're going to make our list of three games everyone should make, number one, the interface-only single-screen interface game. Number two, the single-screen action game with with no level, you know, just stuff that spawns in. And the third one, I would say some sort of collage-based game because you will never feel more creative than when you were snipping things up, you know, scanning them into your computer, taking photos on a phone, and and having to work with what's there. That's the other thing. You know, they weren't limited to collage, they could paint, they could they could sculpt things and then photograph them. But there is something about getting some assets and then working with what they are, which can kind of lead to other creative decisions later on which lead to further creative decisions, and before long you've made something really interesting and individual. It's kind of like earlier on when I talked about the interplay between, you know, the theme of your game and the mechanics. And you start off with a character that's just a block, the character becomes a monkey, and then and then you decide what else the monkey needs to do. It is is that kind of thing, but in this case it's like you start off with some assets, you think, "What do I have here?" You know, "Oh, this this looks like a carpet."

34:03 Even though that probably wasn't a carpet, that was probably a shirt, right? And you you start to get things suggested by the materials that you can then work with. I think it's a really neat way to work. Not necessarily a great way to make a polished thing that people are going to want to buy off you, but a really good way to stimulate creativity. For myself, as a sort of hobbyist developer and someone who can't really do art or is very limited in the sort of art styles they can do, I really like the process of just grabbing some assets from somewhere and just doing what I can with them. And and this this activity I feel kind of encourages that.

34:37 There you have it. The the three beginner game projects that myself and my colleague used to use to torture students with in their first year. Let me know what you think. If you think they were good ideas, if you think we were mean cuz of the type of constraints we used, or if you've got any other suggestions for the sort of mini projects that you think people should do to help them break down the sort of sub-disciplines within game development.

35:00 For me, I think those are a really good start. The the the game that is just an interface, the game that is just action, and then the the weirdly experimental grab some assets and just slam them together visually noisy horrible art game. I think I think those are all nice constraints. Make you work in a way that is is kind of creative and make sure that you are understanding the fundamentals of what you're doing. Because what tends to happen when we're over ambitious, when we start off with big games, is that the quality of everything goes down cuz you don't know how to do any of it and there's too much of it to do. I know a lot of people when they're starting out and they're told make small games, they think that advice is coming from the place of oh, this will help you finish, right? If you're not too ambitious, you will actually finish your game. If you make a small game, you can make a game in 6 months rather than 3 years. For me, it's actually more the point that if you try and make something that's too big, the relative quality of every part of that thing will go down.

35:59 And even if you spend 5 years on it, even if you spend 10 years on it, it's going to be a worse thing than if you try to do a smaller thing and make every part of it good. Start small, give yourself projects little and often, and like have specific learning goals in mind with each one rather than treating everything you're doing as as playing at being a professional game developer who wants to release something. Because that's not how you learn stuff. That's not how creative people become world-class, you know, professional people in their field. You get there by by incrementally learning how to do different things. And you often have to separate those things out and practice them in a in in their own context and then put them together later on.

36:45 And you are totally welcome to ignore all of my advice and just go ahead and try and make your big game and and maybe you'll luck out and be fine with that. But I do think this is the best way to make sure that all of the individual skills you need to make a better thing are refined and honed before you try and do that.