Design

This is probably obvious to any actual game designer, but I had to learn it the hard way: don’t try to make things look realistic. When I first wanted the game to look beautiful, my instinct was that more realism is better. It turns out realism is expensive on two fronts. You need a lot of detail to pull it off, which costs performance. And even when it works, the result is boring — a slightly worse version of a photograph nobody asked for. ...