RESEARCH, MOFO, DO YOU DO IT?

I think that if your game is ambitious, or if it is a commercial game, you SHOULD do some type of research.

I pretty much almost never have. I plan to do so in the future when I start making bigger and better games that I plan on making money off of.

Mitsuhide_The_Vagrant
I think that if your game is ambitious, or if it is a commercial game, you SHOULD do some type of research.

why

I mean, if your game is based specifically on how different metals react to each other or if you're using the Wu Xing as your in-depth elemental system, yeah, look it up, but "I made a fantasy world and now I'm making a game set in it" does not automatically mean "NEW FEATURE: I DID RESEARCH ON PANDA BEAR SEMEN."

I research other things like diseases.

Architecture is one area that I think is really beneficial for area builders to do research in. For any game set in the real world this is basically a must. And even in a semi-serious fantasy world, it helps a lot if the architecture resembles a specific style, since your setting probably resembles a specific culture from a specific period. (If your game is about a war between fish-people who live underwater and bird-people who live in trees, architecture research will admittedly be low priority.)

Fighting stances is the other thing. Humanoid players and enemies should generally be in fighting stances during battles. If you don't know what fighting stances look like you should find out before you start pixelling. I'm as guilty of screwing this up as anyone, because I hate making graphics so much.

author=Cozzer
Well, it depends on what counts as "research".
If you're making a short, Tetris-like puzzle game, is playing a lot of puzzle games to see which ideas work and which don't "research"?

Well, as calunio pointed out earlier:

author=calunio
Research is more like an academic type of behavior... reading, taking notes, etc.

And what Max pointed out:

author=Max McGee
(I mean researching "real life", not researching other games, although we naturally need to do that too, that's not really what this topic is about.)

Sometimes I look things up. For example, when I'm doing a desert, I look up desert images to get ideas that's more fun than just flat sand with some dunes. I haven't done any remotely extensive research yet though.

When I get bored, I look up random things anyway. Sometimes, my game ideas/story seeds are born out of that random research, so I guess I do this in reverse order sometimes. My problem is that once I have an idea/mechanic/story in mind, I'll go off the deep end with the research. I end up with 50+ browser tabs open that I thumb back and forth through, opening new tabs whenever I get to something I think might be interesting or something I can use.

I'm really bad about devouring photos. For some reason when I describe scenes in my head, I tend to get the feeling or vibe more than the actual appearance. I have crowd pictures, architecture, pixel tutorials, and all other sorts of stuff in a collection of folders humbly named "Project title" Resources. Right now, the main folder for one project has 5,072 files in 231 sub folders.

Am I even going to attempt to shoehorn all of that useless knowledge into a game? Hell, no.

I have been doing research for a possible project lately, collecting data from websites and watching documentaries. My problem is I tend to get more interested in the research than in the project, apparently.

I guess the trick is to do enough research to be competent in whatever field you are writing about, but not so much that you become lost in your subject. As a result of my problems in that area, I tend to gravitate towards projects that require less research, and by extension offer me less opportunity to take off on a tangent, bullet train style.

Lately I've been reading a number of books and articles on architecture for the settings in my game. I've also brushed up on real world mythologies, political systems and medieval terms.

Of course, it's all going into the blender at the end of the day!

In my life time, I have studied almost every ancient civilization that was considered advanced or had major ideas that I could draw parallels to Babylon (Persia, Greece, Rome, Egypt, Aniu, and Chinese respectively, along with the history of warfare that followed it all the way into the early 21st century with the decedent nations (Iran, Greece, Itlay, Egypt, Japan, China and America {arguably Rome mark II} ) and this with my training as a swordsman and my studies as a student of languages, I have done tons of research, all for fun.

Never do I research for a game, but many times I draw off of my knowledge of the many things I have read, to utilize in a game. I feel as if games that are overly researched lose something, some type of originality if that makes sense.

I always try to couch subjects I'm not that knowledgeable about in things that I know very well. I have found, several times, that too much research tends to make things very dry.

There is almost a compulsion to try and wedge as much "cool facts" and "interesting data" into the end work as possible, which can really detract from the story and overall feel of a piece.