10 things you need to know before building your first video game

You’ve got an idea for a video game. Maybe it’s a puzzle you keep solving in your head, or a world you’ve been sketching for years. What you might not have is a background in code, art, or game engines.

Cutting out the code doesn’t cut out the design work. Every game still needs dozens of decisions: how things move, what the player sees, and what happens when they press a button. You’ll still make every one of them – just as a designer, not a programmer, describing what you want instead of coding it.

Here are 10 things to think through before you start building your first video game.

1. Know what your player does, again and again

Every game has a core loop: a repeatable sequence of actions, often shaped like challenge, action, and reward. Before you think about levels, characters, or upgrades, get that loop right. The question that matters most at this stage is “is this game fun?” – and piling on polish can end up band-aiding over the problem that the core game isn’t fun.

Try this: Describe what your player does in one sentence.

2. Pick a genre and learn what players expect

A genre is the type of game you’re making – puzzle, racing, platformer, and so on – and each one comes with expectations. Take platformers. Players expect levels with uneven ground and floating platforms that they cross by jumping and climbing. A platformer without jumping would feel wrong to most players.

Building on something players already know helps them pick up your game faster. A familiar foundation lets a game ramp up rapidly without alienating the player. The same goes for controls: When they match what players expect, the experience feels frictionless. But you don’t have to copy everything. Many new games stand out by changing just one thing: making it easier or harder, or adding or taking away a control. So learn what players expect from your genre, then pick the one thing you’ll do differently.

3. Keep your scope small enough to finish

Ambition is great. Finishing is better. Be ruthless about the game’s scope, and when you’re torn between options, ask which choice is going to take the least amount of time.

Test ideas with quick prototypes. A prototype lets you answer a question, quickly, so keep your prototypes small and specific. Just don’t get stuck there: If you never stop making prototypes, you won’t make a video game.

4. Choose a visual style you can sustain

There’s no single right look. There’s no such thing as the “best game art style” since it depends on your idea, your resources, your intended audience, the desired game play, and more.

Start with feeling. Ask “What are we trying to convey? What should the player feel?” Teams often explore this through mood pieces, concept art and sketches before production begins. Then stay consistent – find a sweet spot between variety and cohesion. If you’re going for pixel art, for example, a limited palette helps unify your visuals.

5. Decide where the camera sits

Your camera choice affects controls, level design, art and how the game feels. First-person views are immersive, but players can’t see their character. Top-down views give a clear layout with less sense of height. Isometric views feel 3D, but depth can be hard to judge.

How much the camera can see – its field of view – shapes mood, too. A narrow view feels much more claustrophobic, while a wider one gives much more peripheral vision. Decide what your player needs to see, and what you want them to feel.

6. Plan your physics – even if it isn’t realistic

Physics is just the rules for how things move in your game. How high can your character jump? How fast do they fall? What happens when they run into a wall? You won’t need any math, but you will need to decide.

Your game doesn’t have to work like the real world. Real-world physics doesn’t always improve the experience. What matters is that your rules stay the same every time, because results that don’t make sense frustrate players. Lots of games bend the rules on purpose. In many platformers, you can still jump for a moment after running off a ledge.

Before you build, ask yourself:

• What can bump into what?
• Should your character feel light and floaty, or heavy and solid?
• Where will you bend the rules to make the game more fun?

7. Make controls feel responsive

When a player presses a button, the game should answer right away. In a study of 94 players, added delays of half a second and one second significantly increased player frustration while significantly decreasing enjoyment and immersion. A useful target is to keep the gap between action and response faster than 100 milliseconds (0.1 second) whenever possible.

Think about the device, too. Touchscreens offer little physical feedback, so touch controls should be forgiving and designed for fluidity, rather than precision.

8. Give every action feedback

Every action needs a response the player can see or hear. Game makers call this “juice”: the little flashes, shakes, and sounds that make an action feel satisfying. Research on how games feel has focused on exactly this – controls that respond quickly, and feedback that’s a little exaggerated.

Juice doesn’t have to be fancy. In one study, players liked comic-style sound words popping up onscreen, like “POW” or “BOOM,” about as much as bursts of sparks and debris.

Sound matters as much as visuals. It only takes a few seconds of playing your favorite game on mute to realize how important sound is. What’s on your screen counts as feedback too. A head-up display (HUD) – the health bar, score, or timer – needs as much planning as the rest of your game. Many games end up with weak on-screen displays because they’re treated as an afterthought.

9. Design the challenge, and how players win or lose

Every game needs a way to win, a way to lose, and a path between them. Difficulty is a careful balancing act, and a game that feels fair can keep players in that challenge zone for a long time. When players fail, they should know why. The worst case is a player who fails and has no idea what they did wrong or how to improve.

Difficulty is really subjective, so consider offering presets – ideally four or more according to Xbox – that players can change at any time without losing game progress. If in doubt, err on the side of easier rather than harder.

10. Playtest early, and design so more people can play

You can’t see your own game with fresh eyes, so let other people play it. Friends and family are a great place to start – just try to add a few people who don’t know you, too. Hand them the game, stay quiet, and watch where they hesitate or get stuck. Then fix what you can and test again. Torn between two ideas? Make a quick version of each and let your testers pick the winner.

Plan for accessibility from the start. Xbox estimates there are nearly 450 million players with some form of disability. Accessibility is not about eliminating challenges; it is about adding flexibility to challenges. For controls, that means going beyond simple control remapping – for example, toggles instead of holds and no button mashing.

Start with a plan, then start building

You don’t need every answer before you begin. But one page that covers your core loop, genre, scope, style, camera, physics, controls, feedback, challenge, and testing plan will save you a lot of rework later. Keep it short, keep it honest, and update it as you learn.

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*Header image note: A notebook sketch of a game level turning into a colorful platformer scene through a text prompt. Image generated by Claude Opus 5.5, October 23, 2026.