TLDR: it is frustrating, initial idea and result have a huge difference, because I associate my game ideas with emotions, that a player feels during the game. When playing a made game I don’t feel these emotions at all.
Game feel is the set of emotions that a person experiences during play session. Game feel is subjective for everyone. It is the only thing that defines game value1.
I came up with a spectacular game idea2. Not long time after, I imagine a default play session, what a player should do, how he would feel. Right from the start I merge game feel with an idea. And this is the path to failure.
Thing is, I’m a good engineer. I’m capable of implementing my game idea. But I also expect that when playing a resulting game, I would experience expected emotions. And it never happens. Probably, because it is a job of a game designer.
I think game designer is responsible for the game feel. It’s a whole field, that I know nothing about. Unlike me, a good game designer can predict what emotions will a player feel during a game. Or, more importantly, game designer knows, how to change an existing product towards a better game feel.
To prevent frustration, I shouldn’t connect ideas with emotions. If I find an idea to be fun in my head, I should not expect it to be fun in reality. There are two ways to be better at making fun games:
You might say: “What a bold statement! How about beautiful graphics? Interesting mechanics? Don’t you think that a game with a bad game feel is valuable because of its graphics?” No, I don’t. In this case graphics are valuable by themselves. You evaluate graphics from the point of its visual value. Therefore, if a game has a bad game feel, it’s bad as a game, it’s not fun to play. All its parts might be fine but game value is not defined by them in separate, important thing is how all pieces together contribute to the emotions that a player feels during the game.↩︎
In this context, I refer to the game idea as an interesting original mechanic, raw gameplay loop, without much detail. I prototype this mechanic, because I think it would be fun to play.↩︎