What Games Are

Just as a reference point, in this article [http://whatgamesare.com/2011/02/you-need-four-coders-production.html] the argument is made that you need four coders to make a game.

I think formula being followed for these articles lends them to being a little...exaggerated. (You NEED X to make a game)

I successfully shipped an XBLA game with one other programmer on my team. It took us 14 months, and we delivered on time, in scope, and on budget.

We had two designers writing scripts, so I _guess_ you could say we had four coders, but there was a vast gap in programming talent there. I had to go back through near ship and rewrite most of the scripts to fix all the bugs.

What you need, is to be smart about how you work (make tools to make making the game easier) and be realistic about what you can accomplish in your given budget/time frame.

I'm not saying gamedev is easy, it's hard, and it takes nearly as long to polish the game as it does to get it up and running. But there are so many target markets out there at this point that saying something like you need 100k/4 coders/100 hours of gameplay is foolish.

It's an interesting question. One piece I recently read comes down clearly on the other side from the author of this post. The fact that it was written by a successful insider makes it more compelling: http://whatgamesare.com/2011/02/you-need-four-coders-production.html

I think the key element that makes it tough for games to be lean is that in many cases, the only real fanfare a game will get is on its release day. If your game sucks on day 1, odds aren't very good that you'll be getting people to try it out after you've ironed out the bugs. Obviously this is more true of console games and PC games than it is of mini-games on FB or flash sites.

this is what I meant by game loop: http://whatgamesare.com/2010/12/functions-vs-loops-finding-fun.html

'strong game loop' was vague, what I meant was what I said in the last sentence, that you can enjoy playing a traditional game without rewards. It is fun to play on its own merit. If you take away the rewards from a social game, it can't stand up on it's own as a 'fun game'.

In Farmville, there are gameplay elements, but its very minimal. In Cow Clicker, another social game, there are no game mechanics at all. There are some 'hardcore' social game companies, like Kabam, but they end up just having more elaborate reward feedback mechanisms.

I remember reading this file back when I got Llamatron on a cover disk in the 90s. Jeff Minter has been a bit of a hero ever since then. Llamatron on the ST was/is remarkable and great fun.

It's strange to see the various turns that the industry took after Shareware. A small number of people did very well out of it; I'm not sure Yak did. But analyses of Shareware vs. Freemium are interesting. For example: http://www.whatgamesare.com/2012/08/freemium-is-not-shareware-20.html

Does anyone know of a libre/free resource that has a list of strategies in the same spirit?

Also, does anyone have a libre/free source for something more tech oriented? I can imagine the cards being something like "make data column oriented instead of row oriented" or "deduplicate data".

The best I've found is the "Little Deck of Game Design" [0], which seems pretty cool.

[0] https://www.whatgamesare.com/2011/10/the-little-deck-of-game-design-project.html