Making a Game is Like Cooking: Your Recipe for Success

Making games is not hard, you just don't have a recipe.

If you're reading this, chances are you've hit that familiar wall in game development. You know the basics, you've shipped a small project or two, but something's missing. You find yourself staring at a blank screen, unsure where to start, or worse, spending hours figuring out implementation details instead of actually making your game.

Here's the truth: You're not a beginner, but you're not an intermediate game dev if you don't have development methods.

Let me explain why this matters and how thinking about game development like cooking can transform your workflow.

The Problem: Lost in the Details

When making a game, most of the time is spent figuring out implementation details, instead of focusing on the game's content. You know what you want to create, but you get bogged down in the "how" rather than the "what."

Some tools, like RPG Maker, provide all the systems you need to be able to focus on creating the actual game. But most general-purpose engines don't hit this kind of high-level tooling. Godot engine is amazing for making games, but as a general purpose engine, it's up to you to create your own library of solutions for your specific case.

This is where the cooking analogy comes in.

The Cookbook Approach

Think about it: Making games is easy if you know the processes to create the resources. It's like cooking, you take raw ingredients (images, sounds, code) and process them in a specific way for each meal.

A cookbook doesn't teach you chemistry. It gives you recipes: clear, step-by-step instructions that produce consistent results. You can follow a recipe once, understand it, and then adapt it for your needs. Game development should work the same way.

Why This Changed Everything for Me

Since I opened my own company, Ludens Studio, I realized that the ability to establish SOPs (Standard Operation Procedures) is the core for any business owner. I create them for everything, and they allow me to delegate the work easily for freelancers. The same happens with game development, but the freelancer is the computer.

This clicked for me during GMTK 2025. I shared my Godot Engine's systems library with the other developer so he could create the features of a tower defense game. We were making a "tower defense on rails in space," as we defined.

I also shared the SOPs on Notion to work with each component of the systems to achieve the desired results. We had everything ready by the end of the first day, and he was amazed by how smooth it was, even though the systems were not meant specifically for Tower Defense games.

That's when I realized: having a cookbook for game development isn't just nice to have. It's the difference between struggling and flowing.

How to Build Your Own Cookbook

To create your own "cookbook", you can follow the same structure as I present in the Platformer Essentials Cookbook. Start by describing the feature, followed by some popular examples of similar features, then some use cases, and finally the actual SOP: a step-by-step guide to recreate the base feature and a step-by-step guide on how to use it for a concrete use case. And finally, an explanation of why you use this specific engineering approach and the problem it solves design-wise.

I like to organize my "recipes" in terms of answering the questions:

• What it is – Define the feature clearly
• Where can I find examples of it – Reference games that use it well
• When should I use it – Identify the right use cases
• How it was made and how I can use it – Provide step-by-step implementation and usage guides
• Why do I use this approach? – Explain the design and engineering reasoning

This structure ensures that your future self (or teammates) can pick up any recipe and understand not just what to do, but why you're doing it that way.

Stop Starting from Scratch

The beauty of this approach is that you never start with a blank page again. Just like a chef has their go-to recipes, you'll have your battle-tested systems ready to deploy.

If you want to speed up your platformer game development, following battle-tested solutions and learn how you can also create your own book of recipes, get a copy of the Platformer Essentials Cookbook, where I show 16 recipes essential to making platformer games, so you can use and reuse them across your projects and never start with a blank page again.

Remember: the goal isn't to memorize every line of code. It's to have a reliable process that lets you focus on what matters – making great games.

Now get out there and start building your cookbook. Your future projects will thank you.

- Henrique Campos