Sometimes, when multiple people tell you to “make the bullets bigger” in your action game, the best course of action is to either investigate what caused this kind of feedback in order to solve the root cause once and for all, or to actually make your bullets bigger for the sole reason of getting different feedback the next time.

If you don’t specify what kind of feedback you want, you might get low-level feedback like “you should tweak the walk animation“ or “you should replace the grey boxes with textured models“. This might even be good feedback, if the grey boxes make it hard to understand what is going on.

But on a more fundamental level, if your prototype is early enough, feedback like “Why isn’t this an RPG?“ or “I wish this mechanic was the main mechanic, and the game was a puzzle game built around that.“ can be valid feedback.

If you are later along development, you want more concrete feedback, like “reduce the colour count and use hue shifting instead of desaturating the dark shades“, or “the controls felt floaty“, or “I wish there was a checkpoint before the boss, and an autosave after, instead of the other way round.“

If you are early on, you can still change course drastically, so you can incorporate feedback about the core mechanics, or thoughts about whether your idea is commercially viable or expandable into a long-form game. You want feedback like “I liked these levels, and they felt very polished at first, but the game quickly explored everything these mechanics had to offer, and it got very repetitive. I don’t think there’s enough there to make a whole long-form game out of this prototype, and I don’t think the mechanic would suit a story-based game.“ or “The combat feels simplistic as is, the combat basic mechanics aren’t fun or interesting, any fun or complexity would have to come in the form of new units with more complex abilities, which might be hard to balance.“ or “Great graphics, tedious gameplay, not all ideas can be winners.“

Feedback along the lines of “You should make a completely different game based on these assets“ is rather useless if a game is late in development, but sometimes you need to hear this kind of thing early on, instead of encouragement and positivity, before you carry a mistake through to perfection.

If however you are more experienced and you want to hone your skills in specific areas, like 2D level design, game feel, pixel art, sound effects, UI, particle effects, animation, or shader programming, you need specific feedback, concrete details and suggestions on what do do differently, even if the overall game idea is not worth salvaging. Constructive feedback helps you get better.

There’s an old post on this tumblr about time sinks I try to keep out of prototypes or jam games. It’s no longer accurate. Scrolling cameras are not that much work, because I have libraries that do the job for me, and big levels are not that big of a hassle to design. Other restrictions, like keeping the resolution and colour count down, have proved immensely valuable - until I see feedback telling me to work on the graphics more. I sometimes want to scream at the computer “I know, I cut corners on purpose.“

Sometimes I see a game by a beginner, with everybody in the comment section trying their darnedest to say something nice and encouraging, next to a 1.5 star overall rating contradicting the nice comments, and no constructive criticism at all. In these cases, it might be better to at least encourage the developer to abandon this prototype and start over based on a different game idea, with all the lessons learned from this prototype. Nobody can make a commercially successful long-form game on their first try.

I don’t want to crush that young guy’s spirits, but I don’t want him to become the overeager schoolboy archetype, make a tumblr, press kit, and concept art for his big game idea, only to get stuck because he cannot grasp the scope of his project until it’s too late. I don’t want to tell somebody to tighten up the graphics on level three when it’s clear that the game idea as it stands was already stretched too thin in the second level.

I also don’t want to tell somebody to work on their content more when the game was a jam game and they ran out of time. I don’t want to tell somebody that the game idea doesn’t work as a long-form game when the game was only ever meant to be a short-form jam game that explores a single idea for five minutes and that’s it. Maybe that game works really well as a short game. Death Stranding wouldn’t work as a five-minute demo, but Braid could.