I’m not great at mentoring entry-level folks.

This is something that I wouldn’t have expected – I was an entry-level person once, right? Should be straightforward.

But I think the weird thing is that while the advice I have for folks is often quite simple – focus on one major idea, reduce risk wherever possible, make something much smaller than you expect and only add complexity once that simple thing is working – implementing that and understanding its value requires a *significant* amount of the kind of context that you only get from shipping games.

Every young game dev I’ve talked to has huge dreams. They want to make big, complex, ambitious things. But even moderately sized things blow up into incomprehensible complexity so fast that it becomes really difficult to learn anything from the experience other than “something somewhere went wrong.” By keeping things small & focused, you can understand the parameters of the thing you’re building, and iterate with a much better understanding of what’s actually happening.

Basically, by keeping things small & comprehensible, you’re going to learn much faster than by trying to wrangle three interconnected new systems where changing one variable in one place completely changes the behavior of the all three systems simultaneously.

The reason I’ve tried for years to get this across to new devs is that if you can get to this point quicker, you’ll learn faster. Which is beneficial, right?

But I think to some degree, learning that interconnected systems explode into incomprehensible complexity is one of those things that human brains aren’t wired to naturally understand, and new devs maybe need to crash into that wall headfirst a few times before they even understand there’s a wall there. Telling someone they need to do things a certain way to avoid crashing into a wall they can’t see… doesn’t work.

So yeah. My point, I guess, is that if you’re a moderately experienced dev who’s smashed into that wall a few times & thinks, “There must be a better way of doing this!” There is! Hit me up. I’d love to help you figure it out. #gamedev