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How to get a better understanding of the game building.
Is it only through playing and building? What are good game designs books that can help through the process?

 

I think of "game design" and "game building" as very different topics. One is this imaginative, creative, empathetic process (game design), the other is a very technical topic (game building). There's a bunch of overlap, but I generally don't think of them as being as related as it would intuitively seem.

For game building, I'd either just crank through a bunch of tutorials, or set your sights low, and build a simple game just to learn how to build games with Unity. It doesn't matter what game, just build something. Copy some other game you like and see if you can make it. It's just a learning project.

For game design, I really liked "A Book of Lenses". That book is packages with different ways you can/should approach the design of games, as well as many of the secondary things, like actually building them.

 

I recommend finding a game that your game is like, and see if the devs did a retrospective. Many of them have for GDC. My game is a top down 3D, so I watched John Romaro talk about the rules he gave himself for making Doom levels.

 

Another resource: Look at a comparable game's reviews on Steam, especially the negative reviews. View them objectively. Some reviews may reflect the reviewer's own biases or current emotional states. But some negative reviews are gold mines of well-reasoned analysis.

 

This is so true, especially since many of the detailed negative reviews are written by people who wanted to like the game and gave it a fair chance.

 

i play devils advocate a little here:

the people who take time to write out well reasoned reviews might only represent a tiny fraction of your audience. this just guessing i dont really know, but i figure for every hardcore nerd who takes time to thoughtfully review games, there is 10,000 regular gamers who purchase the game and never think nearly that deep into it.

so the main metric i'd want to measure is money and time. unfortunately i think you need to develop some sort of analytics to really get useful measurements there. But all the big shots do this for a reason.

if you can measure money and time, then it's just basic scientific method testing from there. change one thing, measure results, and so on.

assuming you beginner that might not be feasible. i've found getting video playthrough is really useful. you can see in realtime how players interact with the game.

 

It depends on what you mean by "building".

Just making a thing isn't enough if you want the design to get better. For that you need to make a thing, put it in front of other people, then dig into the details of how they react and why, what works for them and what doesn't.

Then you can change your design, implement (build) the changes, and see how people react to the result.

Playing other people's stuff is helpful for a couple of reasons. First, you get to be on the receiving end and examine your own reactions. You can then reflect on why you reacted that way, what aspects of the design contributed to that, and so on to inform your own future decisions. Also, you can examine what they did, why you think they did it, and consider changes you'd make and what impact they might have - both on players and, importantly, on the rest of the game (both design and implementation).

Which part of it?

 

I think at the beginning process, something that simple but yet cool to play. For example, simple fps, monsters spawn but know how to make it more interesting without thinking about epic big worlds, etc..

small, simple, effective.