Distilling Lessons on Directing Sticker Delight — from Scratch — as a First-Time Indie Game Director

Hello, I’m Li . In this article, I’m wearing the hat of game director for Sticker Delight, a cozy, indie sticker game on Steam.

I would like to attempt to distill the lessons learned, memorable questions and ‘clues’ from my experience directing a game from scratch for the first time. I hope to share these with other first-time game directors, as I have received multiple questions on the topic. If you are a seasoned game director, feel free to share your perspectives as well — your insights could be valuable for those just starting out.

For context, I have developed and shipped multiple games for the past six years, primarily as a producer and product manager, before venturing into game direction. I’ve always enjoyed hearing development stories from game directors, and I find it fascinating to learn how they navigate challenges to finally bring their games to the world.

Sticker Delight at a glance

• Developed by a team of three: myself as game director-producer-publishing lead alongside two talented teammates in art and technology
• Our team has experience using agile methodology to develop games
• We decided early on to self-publish (while remaining open to marketing support) to gain a deeper understanding of Steam’s ecosystem
• Our first game on Steam
• The initial game concept was a cozy game revolved around potlucks and stickers. We had never previously developed a cozy game or worked with potluck or sticker theme before
• Development from initial idea to final production build took ~6 months — well within our development budget. Including publishing work and holidays, the total timeline was 8.5 months
• Currently rated Positive on Steam and a finalist of the SEA Game Awards 2024.

A ‘creative toolbox’: what practices helped turn Sticker Delight from an idea into a finished product in ~6 months?

As a first-time indie game director creating a new game from scratch, I quickly realized that the process is full of unknowns, ambiguity, ideas, and possibilities. With plenty decisions to make, it’s easy to fall into analysis paralysis, sunk cost fallacy, or lose direction. At the same time, I was fully aware that an indie studio has limited resources and strict time constraints — yet I needed to ensure these limitations wouldn’t prevent our team from making a great product.

With the considerations above, I deliberately picked up practices to keep our team consistently moving forward: making decisions, working on the most important parts. And yes, we got enough sleep throughout development — I believe sleeping is crucial to stay sharp and creative.

Those practices are part of the ‘creative toolbox’:

1. Considering there is limited time and resources, deliberately pick most important design goals to work on. Prioritize the most difficult part early (biggest uncertainty in pre-production / missing parts in production). Resist the urge to polish until it’s needed (or just allocate time to polish).
2. Use lateral thinking to approach design problems that I don’t know how to solve yet. In my case, I tinker with the problems by asking questions and sketching/prototyping until a deadline. Typical outcomes:
   - The design problem gets solved. Hence, we move on
   - The design problem isn’t solved yet, but we understand the problem better and sometimes find new constraint(s). Hence, we add time to iterate on the solution
   - No meaningful progress to the design problem on the deadline. Most likely, the problem is outside my capability at the moment or I haven’t found the way to approach this problem, so this isn’t the way to go. Can we reframe the problem? Or should we deprioritize the problem for now?
3. Free up creativity and decision making power through note-taking habit:
   - Game Design Document (GDD): used to document design intentions, concepts, and design decisions for the team.
   - Second Brain (PARA Method): used for personal reference, brainstorming, and tracking Work-In-Progresses (WIPs).
4. Get used to sketching / doing quick prototyping even when we don’t have all the information needed. It’s easier to review and evolve something tangible than nothing.
5. Allocate playtesting schedule in the development journey. Besides gathering feedback or doing validation, playtesting helped us reconsider most important design goals to work on.
6. Be patient and trust the process. As we kept making decisions and executing even when it’s difficult, everything started to fall in place.

“Sucking at something is the first step towards sorta being good at something.”
— Jake the Dog

No, I don’t mean to promote mediocrity. It’s actually the opposite (see the reasoning in practice #4 above).

While the previous section is written like a collection of ‘tools’ inside a ‘creative toolbox’, in this section, I’m trying to capture memorable questions I had and how I approached them. I understand that each game is different, hence:

• Feel free to jump into questions that seem relatable, or
• Read through the questions — I’ve written them with the intention to share what I meant by ‘tinkering’ with design problem (practice #2)

How can I actually design a fun & fresh experience with stickers?

Context: One of Sticker Delight’s design pillars is using stickers to progress inside the game. I tried to come up with different gameplay using stickers, but none was satisfactory in the beginning.

Approach: I began to reframe the problem and captured the following hints during pre-production:

• What do I need to know about making a fun experience?
  Hint: “Fun means deliberately manipulating a familiar situation in a new way.” (Ian Bogost on WIRED: A Game Designer Explains the Counterintuitive Secret to Fun)

Taking the hint above, I played with stickers for some time — trying to harness their fun aspects. Soon enough, I had multiple ideas for sticker puzzles. The next questions I asked:

• What makes deep game mechanics (instead of complex ones)?
  Hint: “On order for a game mechanic to be deep it needs two very important things — clear objectives and a variety of meaningful skills.” (Mike Stout on gamedeveloper.com: Evaluating Game Mechanics for Depth)
• What makes a bad vs good puzzle? How can I adjust its difficulty?
  Hint: Designing the Puzzle by Bob Bates.
• I noticed that some puzzle mechanics blend really well with their themes. So I wondered: is there anything I need to keep in mind as I explore puzzle problems & themes?
  Hint: The Game Overanalyser: The Art of Puzzle Design | How Game Designers Explore Ideas and Themes with Puzzles and Problems.

These hints had helped me conceptualize fresh sticker puzzles, worked with my teammates to finish the prototype, and play-tested it. Playtesters had fun with it!

One of sticker puzzles inside Sticker Delight

How to nail a cozy / wholesome game vibe?

Context: As a player playing finished games, I can easily tell whether a game nails its vibe. However, when Sticker Delight was still just a concept, I needed to figure that out.

Approach: After tinkering with the question, I tried to find other product with varying vibes — music and movie. Then I came up with a working definition of vibe for myself: vibe is the impression or feeling delivered to audience, and behind it are components that follow certain rules.

Let’s take music as an example. Lo-fi and rock music deliver totally different vibes, yet both consist of the same components: melody, lyrics (if any), arrangement, and delivery technique (I have limited knowledge of music, please excuse the simplification). Each genre has common rules, as well as dos and don’ts, for these components.

Then I looked back at games. Games have many components, and depending on the genre, the amount of design work needed will vary. For Sticker Delight, we focused on the following components: art (style, color palette, composition), gameplay, UX, ambience (sound), and narrative.

As we showcased the game to players and collected qualitative feedback, we were able to confirm that we delivered the cozy / wholesome vibe. Also, thanks to Gamermatters for mentioning that Sticker Delight is wholefully wholesome.

Sticker Delight’s in-game vibe

How do I know we’re making progress throughout pre-production?

Context: Since we’re doing this professionally, there will always be time constraints. Hence, I wanted to objectively gauge whether we’re making progress through the unknowns.

Approach: This one is quite straightforward — I found the following GDC talk:

Embracing Ambiguity: How to Do Good Work When You Don’t Know What to Do by Ruth Tomandl

Let me spill some hints from the talk:

• Is it OK if things are ambiguous right now? It depends — where in the project are you?
• Signs of too much ambiguity — when it actually starts causing problems (details in the talk)

In the production phase, where should I put my focus on?

Context: As a first-time indie game director, I’m keen to improve my practice to ensure I’m doing what’s best for my team and the game.

Approach: I wondered, “What’s the desired outcome by the end of production phase?” I think the answer is having the best game possible for release. The practices listed in the ‘creative toolbox’ above have helped me, and I’d like to emphasize following practices:

• Leading the team to build the most important experience. Resist the urge to polish until it’s needed / during polishing time (practice #1)
• Allocating playtesting schedule (practice #5)
• Being patient and trusting the process (practice #6)

At the beginning of the production phase, I thought each team member would quietly focus on producing assets and implementing them. However, as we kept working, interesting ideas and discussions kept coming up (which I think is a good thing). It’s my responsibility to understand the context and thought process behind them, examine how they relate to the overall game experience, and determine when to focus on them — if relevant.

Thus, let me add one more practice to the toolbox: to make myself available, proactively listen, and understand what team members are trying to say while staying aligned to the game direction. A highly recommended talk on this practice:

Beyond Game Design by Richard Carrillo

Closing

To fellow first-time game directors in game-making journey… I wish you the best in your game-making journey! Keep making decisions, listening, and talking to people — one step at a time. The game will get better as time progresses.

Feel free to use the comments below to share your questions related to this article or related to your game directing journey.

If you find this topic helpful — please also share which part do you find most useful for you.