In 1960, saxophonist Steve Lacy was hired to play a series of performances with Thelonious Monk. During that time he wrote down a list of tips — things Monk said, observations he made, advice offered in the way that advice often gets offered in a working band: casually, in the moment, not necessarily intended to become a document anyone would still be reading sixty years later.
Monk was one of the most distinctive jazz pianists who ever lived, known for an improvisational style that was so singular it confused people who weren’t ready for it and floored the ones who were. As an artist, composer, and bandleader he dealt with creative challenges, difficult collaborators, business pressures, and audiences who didn’t always think his latest work measured up to what came before. If that sounds familiar to anyone who has shipped a game, it should.
These tips aren’t a game development framework. They’re jazz advice filtered through one musician’s memory, interpreted here by someone who makes games (me). Take what’s useful, leave the rest — and if any of these send you down a Monk rabbit hole, that’s not the worst thing that could happen to you.
#1 — “Just because you’re not a drummer, doesn’t mean that you don’t have to keep time.”
Just because you’re working on your part of a game doesn’t mean you can ignore the rest of it. The different parts of a game are symbiotic — a spotting system relies on visual cues, voice over, sound design, and systems that other people built while thinking about a dozen other features at the same time. Stay focused on your thing, but stay aware of everything around it.
#2 — “Pat your foot and sing the melody in your head when you play.”
Keep the goals and pillars of the game in mind while working on any individual part of it. Know what you’re trying to accomplish before you try to build it. It’s easy to drift — to get so deep into a feature that you lose track of how it fits into the whole. Tap your foot. Stay in the song.
#3 — “Stop playing all that bullshit, those weird notes, play the melody!”
Don’t get distracted by what other games are doing. If you start adjusting your goals and features to chase competitors or respond to whatever just launched, you’re no longer making your game — you’re making an amalgamation of your game and theirs, and it won’t be as good as either. Play your melody.
#4 — “Make the drummer sound good.”
Everyone on the team is there for a reason — because they’re good at something specific. Your job isn’t to compete with that, it’s to enhance it. Figure out how your work makes theirs better, and trust that they’re doing the same for you. A band where everyone is trying to be the loudest person in the room sounds exactly like you’d expect.
#5 — “Discrimination is important.”
In the sense of having the judgment to distinguish good taste from bad taste. Being able to read how players might react to your project, and having the taste to make the calls that get the best response — that’s a skill every developer spends their entire career developing. It matters, because no one will ever play the exact game that exists in your head and appreciate it exactly the way you do. The gap between your vision and their experience is where taste lives.
#6 — “You’ve got to dig it to dig it, you dig?”
You don’t have to love everything about the game you’re working on. But you have to love something — the genre, the team, the art direction, the problem you’re solving, something. Find the thing and hold onto it. If you genuinely can’t find it, be honest with yourself about that, because the work will show it either way. Get invested or get out of the way of someone who is.
#7 — “All reet!”
Alright. Sometimes a thing is just good and doesn’t need more than that. Not every moment in a game needs to be profound. Not every feature needs to carry thematic weight. Some things just work, and working is enough.
#8 — “Always know.”
Ideas and instincts don’t mean anything until you play them — and even then, what you find might be different from what you expected. An educated guess is still a guess. The difference between thinking something works because it feels right and knowing it works because you’ve tested it is the difference between shipping a good game and shipping a game you hoped would be good. Test. Then test again. Then adjust and test some more.
#9 — “It must be always night, otherwise they wouldn’t need the lights.”
Darkness is what makes light meaningful. Contrast is what gives anything impact. A game that is relentlessly intense stops feeling intense. A game with no quiet moments makes its loud ones harder to feel. The design of contrast — between tension and release, between action and stillness, between chaos and clarity — is one of the most underrated skills in game development.
#10 — “Let’s lift the band stand!!”
Pour everything into what you’re working on. The emotion, the talent, the hard work — players feel it. Maybe not consciously, maybe not in a way they could articulate, but the difference between a game made with genuine investment and one made without it tends to show up in the experience even when it can’t be pointed to directly.
#11 — “I want to avoid the hecklers.”
Not all criticism deserves equal weight, and learning to tell the difference is its own skill. I’ve written about this at more length here — but the short version is: there’s feedback that comes from genuine engagement with your work, and there’s feedback that comes from people who just want to tear something down. The first kind is worth sitting with even when it stings. The second kind will heckle you regardless of what you make. Don’t let it shake you.
#12 — “Don’t play the piano part, I am playing that. Don’t listen to me, I am supposed to be accompanying you!”
Don’t try to solve the same problems others are already solving. Work to solve them together, or divide and conquer — but duplicating effort while leaving other problems unaddressed is how projects get lopsided. Collaboration means knowing who’s covering what and trusting them to cover it.
#13 — “The inside of the tune (the bridge) is the part that makes the outside sound good.”
Aim for more than one feeling in your game. The contrast between different levels, different tones, different approaches to play — that’s what takes a game from good to memorable. A bridge in a song exists to make you feel the return of the melody more acutely. The darker or quieter parts of a game exist to make the peaks hit harder.
#14 — “Don’t play everything (or everytime); let some things go by. Some music just imagined.”
Leave space for players to bring something of themselves to the experience. The most obvious application is narrative — you don’t have to explain everything, and the things you leave unsaid can be more powerful than the things you spell out. But it applies to design too. A player’s imagination is one of your strongest tools. Don’t crowd it out.
#15 — “What you don’t play can be more important than what you do play.”
Don’t try to be multiple games at once. Focus. The features that enhance each other belong in — the ones that dilute or distract don’t, even if they’re good ideas on their own. A game that tries to do everything rarely does anything as well as it could.
#16 — “A note can be small as a pin or as big as the world, it depends on your imagination.”
The smallest moments in a game, if executed well, can be the most effective. A sound cue. A line of dialogue. A detail in the environment that nobody asked for and some players will never notice. The ones who do notice will remember it. Scale of impact has almost nothing to do with scale of effort.
#17 — “Stay in shape! Sometimes a musician waits for a gig & when it comes, he’s out of shape & can’t make it.”
Games have evolved continuously since the first one shipped and will keep evolving. The tools change, the platforms change, the expectations change. Stay curious, stay current, stay ready to adapt. The worst time to start learning something new is when you suddenly need it.
#18 — “When you are swinging, swing some more!”
If you find something that’s working — really working — capitalize on it. Games don’t always become what was originally planned, and that’s not always a bad thing. Sometimes a mechanic or a system or a tone emerges during development that’s better than what was designed. When that happens, follow it. Don’t ignore a discovery because it wasn’t in the document.
#19 — “(What should we wear tonight?) Sharp as possible!”
Don’t let one part of your game flounder while others flourish. A game with stunning visuals and broken audio, or incredible gameplay and a UI that fights the player — these things undercut each other. Everything counts. The weakest part of your game is the part players will remember when they’re deciding whether to recommend it.
#20 — “Always leave them wanting more.”
Restraint hits harder than abundance. It’s easy to keep adding — another feature, another level, another system — but the games that land with the most impact tend to be the ones that held back anything that didn’t earn its place. If something isn’t making the impact it needs to make, cut it or fix it. A tighter, more intentional experience will leave people wanting more of it. A bloated one just leaves people tired.
#21 — “Don’t sound anybody for a gig, just be on the scene.”
Being recognized for your work is a result of doing good work, not a goal to pursue separately. There are developers who have built significant public profiles through interviews, social media, and self-promotion — and more than a few of them became noticeably worse developers in the process. The work is the thing. Focus on that.
#22 — “Those pieces were written so as to have something to play & to get cats interested enough to come to rehearsal!”
Make games you’d actually want to play. It shows — in the quality of the work and in the people it attracts. The best teams tend to form around projects that genuinely excite the people making them.
#23 — “You’ve got it! If you don’t want to play, tell a joke or dance, but in any case, you got it!”
Try everything. You don’t always know what’s going to work until you find it — and sometimes finding it looks like doing something that seems completely beside the point. Keep moving, keep experimenting, keep making progress even when the most obvious path isn’t available. You’ll know what works when it works.
#24 — “Whatever you think can’t be done, somebody will come along & do it. A genius is the one most like himself.”
If you want to make something that pushes the craft forward, you have to be willing to try things that haven’t been tried and work hard enough to see whether they hold up. Following someone else’s formula will get you as far as they got, at best. The work that makes an impact tends to come from people who were most fully themselves while making it.
#25 — “They tried to get me to hate white people, but someone would always come along & spoil it.”
If one tip on this list reflects the time it was written, it’s this one. But the game development interpretation isn’t hard to find: the industry has no shortage of stereotypes about different disciplines, different roles, different kinds of developers. Don’t buy into them. Let the people on your team show you what they’re actually capable of before you decide you already know.
Special thanks to Adam Neely for the video that inspired this post: youtu.be/tBxjacxRshE