Check it!
I watch and rewatch a lot of videos to learn and get tips for whatever I am working on. Sometimes it is hard to judge whether a video is relevant to my interests or not. This will solve that problem for me and hopefully it will help someone else too.
What This Video Is
The title of this video is quite accurate. This presentation is about how the presenter (Zach Gage) designs games under the philosophy that everything about your game should be understood just by looking at it.
It's Content
The main concept in this video is called the 3 reads. This is a guideline on how information should be displayed on the screen. Your game should be clear and understandable from a screenshot or from brief gameplay.
Zach Gage is a mobile developer so the presentation is mostly from that perspective. He does acknowledge that this concept can be applied to more “complex” games and shows an example.
The presentation is easy to understand with good examples. He goes into the benefits of developing a game with this concept in mind. He even walks through his struggles with applying it to a game he is currently working on.
This shows that it won’t be easy to apply to everything so you might have to get creative to make it work.
Is It For You?
If you are making a game or are just interested, this presentation is perfect as it gives you a very useful design angle to think about whether you use it or not.
“Nothing that anyone tells you is gonna be the one thing that makes you successful or not successful, but I do think that finding success with your games relies upon having a lot of little tricks that really fit your own practice and capabilities and leveraging those tricks as best you can”
~Zach Gage~