“Your first ten games will suck"!

I’ve been making games for over 30 years if you count the games I made to play with friends and relatives when I was a kid. I bet more than 10 of them sucked by my current standard but they were fine for us then.

I think the author is trying to say that you need experience to make good games.

How much depends on how fast you learn. Making 10 crappy games quickly won’t necessarily teach you anything.

What book are you reading?

While I guess the suckiness of the game could be debated, my first attempt at game design was at least deemed good enough to be picked up and published by Z-man Games.

I would say it all depends on how much game playing background you have, and who the audience for the game is. In general, I agree with the previous posters in that I don't see the supposed helpfulness of the statement and it would make me disregard most of the other information put forth in this book.

Perhaps in the video game world it might be different in that your first few games might well be below par due more to lack of game programming skills than game design itself.

. . . on the voice the author's using, and how he is conveying this message, but I wouldn't say there's anything unprofessional about it. I also agree with people who are saying to take this with a grain of salt.

The idea that one's first creative endeavors will not be their best is echoed in lots of books about creation (I've read quite a bit about writing). It's designed to ENCOURAGE people to keep trying, and to keep pushing the boundaries of their imagination, and to keep innovating. Taking it literally may, of course, have the opposite effect.

So, Don't. :)

10 out of 9 people are bad at fraction and 65.734% of all statistics are made up :)

Can I ask what book it is by chance?

Agreed. I've heard this and varieties of the same statement in several fields.

People are used to their expectations and want to be naturally good the first time they attempt. When I teach basic drawing workshops its one of the first expectations I cover -- you WILL not be good the first time and if you are then I will kick out cause you are just wasting time.

Personally, my first game design sucked as the day is long. My second & third weren't bad but out of focus. Fourth I would play right now. But a big component to keep on trucking and making better designs was to expect NOT to be stellar the first go around. You just don't know everything you need to know. It would be like a baby trying to write a novel.

simpson

I'd rephrase the statement as: "The more you do, they better you'll get."

There are a lot of implications here:

1) You'll make better games. You'll expand your vocabulary of mechanics and your sense of game balance.
2) You'll get used to taking ideas to prototypes to finished games. You'll learn that you really can make games.
3) You'll find your "stride" - You'll work faster and more efficiently. You'll figure out what order of design and development operations works best in each given situation for you.
4) You'll get better at taking constructive and destructive criticism. Once you have more than a few games, you don't have as much of your ego bound up in each game.
5) You'll get better at recognizing a fruitless project and leaving it.

As stated by earlier replies: The way to get good is practice. Just do it.

Are your first 10 games guaranteed to stink? No.
Will they be as good as your 30th, 50th, or 100th game? Probably not.
Will you make stinkers after your first 10 games? Sure, that's part of creating stuff. Sometimes it's a hit, and sometimes it's a miss.

How do you get them out of the way really fast? Set a schedule for yourself. For example: "I will design, prototype, play test, and finish one game every month." I've heard that's pretty good practice if you stick with it for a year.

I think that "small" games are a great start. It's like writing short stories as practice before writing a novel.

Oh, and I don't think that the games have to be published to count. In fact, I think that'd be pretty sad. It's always sad when a bad game gets published. =( Of course, I have a pretty strong bias for web-released print-and-play games.

My first game sucked. My second game got published. So, no, I don't agree with the statement.

However, I think what the author of that book is trying to say: don't get stuck trying to get your first design working over and over again. Don't get hung up on a single game idea. Do your best, and if the design just doesn't work, if it just doesn't come together, then give it up and try designing another game. Don't be afraid you'll only ever have one good idea for a game. If you really are destined to be a game designer you'll have plenty of good ideas over time (and even more bad ones, but that's OK too).

I also agree that it is a good idea to start out designing small games at first. This will teach you the basics of game design without wasting huge amounts of time.

In some way, I agree with the quote:

When I was 4, I turned my living room into a pachinko-style marble game.
When I was 8, I made a game in day care where players ran around a track. Think Monopoly.
When I was 12, I turned a moving box into a two-level dungeon crawl.
When I was 16, I took a trip to DigiPen in Seattle and decided that I did NOT want to be a videogame designer, laying to rest about 8 years of hypothetical contemplation on the world's greatest next Mario game/Fighting game/Stealth action game/RPG. I started creating sports (this included joining my college's rugby team, if you can believe it and I also play australian football competitively now).

I made a new friend when I was 19 and we had three very viable games (two of them sports) by the time I was 21. Since then I have posted two not-so-great perfect information games on iggamecenter.com, and we continue to make games with a soccer ball and a wall whenever we find a new element.

I'm 23 now, and returning to the board game design vein (I still want to make the "next great field sport"). I'm just saying, I feel like I got my 10 sucky games out of the way early...and I still have sucky ideas.

You will get better over time. The moral of the quote is probably not to waste time thinking that one idea is going to be the lynchpin - hell, I think Knizia thinks of a different game to publish every week or so, and Teuber only ever hit the jackpot once (considering the multiple SdJ's, that's pretty nuts). Basically, if you want to design games, you have to design gameS.