education - What are some non-obvious topics to learn for game development?

I've been writing games for around 10 years now (from QBasic to C# and everything in-between). I need to start stretching my skills into different areas. What are other, surprising topics I should read up on?

Expected topics would include the usual suspects:

• Programming language of your choice


• Scripting language


• Source control


• Project management (or Agile)


• Graphics API


• Maybe some AI (A* path-finding?)


• Physics (projectile physics)


• Unit testing (automated testing)

I'm looking for more esoteric topics; things that you don't expect to need to know, but if you do know them, they make a difference. This could include things like:

• Art skills (drawing, lighting, colouring, layout, etc.)


• Natural language processing


• The physics of sound (sound-waves, doppler effect, etc.)

Personally, I feel that having technical art skills (eg. can make decent art-work if you can only come up with ideas; or, following Photoshop/GIMP tutorials) was the most beneficial for me.

This is not intended to be an open-ended question; I'm looking for specific skills that helped you and you expect will continue to benefit you in the short- and long-term.

Answer

Story Telling - people and critics always say story is important in games. It's often added as an addendum to a list of things your game should have, but actually implementing a compelling narrative in a game is hard. Games narratives get put into the context of literature or movies often, yet they fundamentally function differently and there is a lot of interesting discussion around about how to even talk about game narrative on its own terms. This gets even more abstract for games that don't use 'characters' or are basically an assembly of mechanics.

Given all that, literary and film analysis can be useful to be able to phrase intent.

Marketing - so you've actually finished a game (haha, as if). Now what? We hear about Minecraft or Angry Birds, but the business side of actually promoting and distributing our game is, for many of us, a giant black box. XNA? Sure, put it on XBLIG, but what else can be done to promote it?

Psychology - Specifically, how do we learn? How can you teach game mechanics through game play so that people aren't totally lost by your esoteric opus on time manipulation?

Graphic Design - Sure we all know that using Papyrus or Comic Sans is bad, but creating a well designed menus system or UI requires skill. This is only partially a subset of art skills, not necessarily an complete subset - some people can be good designers without being able to draw well.