Which game dev beliefs did you change your mind on?

In the past, I’ve viewed some quality-of-life changes as minor, scope creep, or mere polish. From a development standpoint, that may be true. However, when players perform the same action hundreds of times per session, even small improvements can have a significant cumulative impact.

One impression that I always get from your video's Jonas, even if it's never explicitly said, is that the enthusiasm to try and learn from your mistakes (ands successes) is probably the most import piece of advice in the end. Even if this is not always your conclusion its always apparent. Your energy to give things a crack is contagions. Thanks for the videos!

I thought like everybody else that doing your dream game as your first game was a bad idea. Now I say, start doing your dream game now, the faster you'll fail at it, the faster you'll learn the tools that you needed anyway to make a small decent game.

Remember people that Jonas will probably be back in 5-10 years commenting again on how he was wrong in this video. That doesn't mean that we should disregard the information in this video, just that we should not take it as the truth. There is no solution to game dev.

It always refreshes me to see some of the major creators come forward and repair their mistakes! I realized at some point that all these videos telling us about stuff should really be questioned, but yours were done with enough personal experience compared to others that it really felt way better than other people's and now you come forward to reflect back on it even more. Thank you and keep doing this repair and reflection of old content, people appreciate you for it more than if you rolled with it and decided to just keep going head high and pumping your chest saying "i am never wrong".

I agree with your points! I always find it helpful to take a step back and evaluate on why I myself did something- Why did I get that game? Why did I click on that video? Why did this hold my attention but this didn't? I think that in addition to some proper research can weed out a lot of ideas that sound good on paper but don't quite hit the mark.

Your list of types of appeal perfectly encapsulates so many of the qualities game trailers can and should highlight!

my belief is that a dev should be a gamer trying to make a game that they wish someone else has made

I think above else, the reflection is the most important part here. Being open to different ideas and growing. I still find myself learning a lot and often asking "what works and what doesn't work" but one thing I realized: While I used to be very much the kind of guy to go "I need a super original hook", I now go "What do people want, and how can I give them a cool new idea based on the thing they want."

'Fun' is a feeling, and there's multiple ways to achieve it. You can have a game that isn't challenging, has weak fantasy and no reward but still be fun and have a player base, like sandbox building games. I found that the best explanation for "play" which is what gamedevs are looking for is explained by Masahiro Sakurai: It must have at least one of four things: Competition, Chance, Imitation, interactive emotion.

The more I learn, the more I realize that I don't know anything

Like many beginner devs I thought That I would have to just "program the game" instead of searching for fun. Then when you search for fun the biggest hurdle you go against is litterally not knowing what to program and being on the equivalent of a white canvas with no proper direction. Finding the game feel and the game loop is harder than anything else.

5:25 "Surfacing what deserves to be surfaced" Hell yes. I recently thought about this concept too. Not only for games but also for shows, movies and music. I feel like there barely are any true "hidden gems" anymore because usually what's good floats to the "top". Not the "top" of EVERYTHING but in today's internet communities we have so many niches that know their stuff so for any given tiny genre, the people there will filter stuff for you. And it only takes one bigger streamer or content creator to find a "hidden gem" until it isn't hidden anymore. It's not the late 90s/early 2000s anymore where some actual hipster has some secret tips for you. Everything in 2025 feels like it's laid out bare and secrets never remain secret for long.

According to my understanding, one of the conditions of flow is getting feedback of your actions. The more instant and bigger the feedback, the better. A good example of this is game development itself. Debugging is boring because you often get no feedback after performing a lot of actions. Yet I stay motivated when programming gameplay. So when we add vfx and sounds to a game, the reason why it is more fun is simply because in our minds, we are making a bigger impact (getting more work done) and getting work done is fun.

a lot of the "creative process" i learnt in making films, not games, before the game development rabbit hole sucked me up. So a lot of the perspectives and opinion changes i've had probably aren't super relatable but here I have 1 that maps decently well onto game development: I used to think that it's a shame that more artsy products with deeper meaning and intent often go so overlooked, because as a creator we often have something to say, to share. that is the point of art. and while i haven't changed my mind about that fully I have very much come to look at that from a new perspective where, putting yourself as a creator to be the center piece of your createive process is actually fairly egotistical and a setup for failure. You DO need to think about marketability and consider your audience, if you're expecting to get an audience. All the well meaning deep art in the world will do no one any good if it doesn't end up getting seen. So, picking a defined genre, a target audience and creating with that audience in mind is KEY to having your voice be heard as an artist. This kind of related to the point in this video that people won't just find your game, in some ways. If you think about who should find your game, there is a good chance that they will if you make a good game and position yourself well in the market, if the intent is to make a certain game, because you want to make that game. The chance that nobody will see that, is in fact pretty big. Ideally you have an idea on what you want to make and then find out if there is an existing audience for it, and adjust your plans slightly to fit with that audience's expectations I'd say, of course i don't want to advocate for making soulless products that are purely optimized to get as many eyeballs on it as possible. But finding a balance where you can remain authentic, while also having your work be seen is super important.

I've been watching your videos for quite a while now (probably 5+ years) and its interesting to see that some of changes in understanding you went through were exactly the same for me. I'm really now starting to think that the only way to get good at basically anything including game development is to have years of experience to learn lessons yourself. Sure, advice can help but experiencing things for yourself gives you an understanding like nothing else

oh man the notion of that the idea matters really resonates with me. I've been thinking.about making a video about it for a while.

Realizing some of these things myself before watching this video has considerably boosted my confidence that im a good designer

7:30 Absolutely true, I am gonna 3D print that right now, and I subbed because of this video!