Each year, the company gathers its staff from various studios and holds a “game jam,” where developers take a week and create something from scratch. Howard said you can elicit creativity from your staff in a variety of ways. Take a repetitive action and make it simple and fun,” he said. “Find things that a player does a lot,” like looking at a list of tasks to do. If you do that, you’ll improve the little things that make all the difference to a gamer. He added, “Work on more of the great stuff. Once you do that enough, the full game will take shape. “We just can’t do everything.”Īnd the third rule is “Great games are played, not made.” You have to play your own game a ton and revise it.

The second rule is to keep it simple, Howard said. But the principles weren’t that different from 18 years ago. The latest game took more than 100 people about five years to create. That was the same experience that Bethesda wanted to create 18 years ago with the very first version of The Elder Scrolls. Define it by the experience you want to have.”įor The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, the Bethesda team’s goal was to reward the player for exploration, and the game gave the player a whole world to explore. “Don’t define the game by the list of the features. First, you have to “define the experience,” Howard said. To create great games, Bethesda has developed three rules. He also said, “Your design is not as important as your execution.” That means you will run into problems that will disrupt your plan and schedule, and how you deal with that depends on the culture you have created within your team.

“Your plan is not as important as your culture,” he said. “How people feel this sense of pride in a game is like nothing else in entertainment,” Howard said.Īs for the actual craft, Howard said you have to build a great team that works well together. Three top investment pros open up about what it takes to get your video game funded.

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