Next Game Blues

Most creatives know that at some point in the process they will suffer thru feeling like their work is terrible and they should just give up. Knowing that this is a part of the process can help you push past this feeling and get your project to a place where you can be proud of it. However, one thing I think we don't acknowledge enough is that moving from a finished project to a new project magnifies the bad feelings. 

When I have a game in the late design stages, my tendency is to believe that I have grown enough throughout the process that all subsequent games will be easier. I will be a better designer and each design will be better than the last. This is, unfortunately, not how it works. I have plenty of bad ideas and abandoned designs. I may never have a better game idea than Deadly Dowagers. I may never sign another game. However, any future success I do have will be because I pushed through the suck. Showing up, making bad games, and accepting feedback is the only way to eventually produce a good game. 

I get particularly down when I am starting a new design after having spent a lot of time polishing a nearly finished game. The "next" game will always be the hardest one. There will always be new challenges. And for those of us with modest to low design output, it may be many, many years before the "next" game gets easier. 

This is where I see a lot of designers give up. If your first game turned out to be a pretty good concept, you may not be prepared for the struggle to find the fun of your second game. And successful designers don't spend a lot of time talking about the designs they've trashed along the way. 

Learning to tolerate being bad at something is how you stick with a skill long enough to become good at it. Producing bad designs gets you to the good designs. But importantly, most designs start out "bad". As designers, whether to others' games or to our own, we need to tailor our feedback to helping get a game to where it will be fun rather than focusing on the ways it is bad. Because of course it's bad. That's how the process works. Let's be more charitable to ourselves and others. (But also, let us not be so nice that a design doesn't make the necessary changes it needs to become good.) 

Designing bad games doesn't make you a bad designer. It's a part of the process of becoming a better designer. 

ShippBoard Games is a board game design blog that updates most Mondays. 

Oct 21-22 I will be at ATX Protospiel in Austin, TX. Nov 12-19 I will be at Tabletop Network and BGGcon in Dallas, TX. Come say hi if you are around.