As you may have noticed, haven’t posted much of yet this year. Sort of took things back to the draw­ing board, so to speak, to try and fig­ure out the best plan going for­ward. The ‘crit­i­cal path’ so to speak that will get me to the point of hav­ing some­thing to actu­ally release.

See the prob­lem is that I have the entire ‘grand scheme’ game designed, planned and orga­nized, but the big issue is just the sheer amount of time that it’s going to take to imple­ment it all. Being an Indie (and even more impor­tantly, being a single-developer indie), this means that every­thing that I want to get into the game — I have to imple­ment per­son­ally. Whether it’s a new model / prop, fea­ture for the character’s to be able to do or otherwise.

Found a cou­ple of great arti­cles / blogs that have helped me alot with regards to nar­row­ing down the focus of the game, while keep­ing the core of what my orig­i­nal inten­tion is intact.

First, before I get into more detail, a few quotes:

Destroy­ing is often a nec­es­sary step in cre­ativ­ity, but it’s a scary step to take. You never know for sure if mak­ing dras­tic changes or even start­ing over is going to pay off.

- from Games­Lol

Know what game you’re not mak­ing
In game design, there’s a very sim­i­lar temp­ta­tion to pack ten thou­sand fea­tures into every game. You want to keep play­ers with every pos­si­ble playstyle happy, sell your game to every imag­in­able demo­graphic, and include ideas from every mem­ber of your team.

from Mike Darga

This point is impor­tant enough that I’ll post a sec­ond bit from the article:

Defin­ing non­goals
It’s impor­tant that each mem­ber of your team is eas­ily able to find out what goals are and aren’t impor­tant for your game. Fea­tures will often worm their way into your game because a promi­nent game has it, one team mem­ber really loves that idea, or over time peo­ple sim­ply for­got what the team’s goals were.

Here are some ideal times to state goals and non­goals for the game or a feature:

* In the ini­tial game pitch
* When announc­ing the project to your team
* In the design doc­u­ment
* When train­ing a new hire
* At the begin­ning of a meet­ing
* When pitch­ing to your pub­lisher
* When plan­ning your mar­ket­ing
* When announc­ing new fea­tures to your players

It also couldn’t hurt to have a very promi­nent list of goals and non­goals on your inter­nal web­page or pinned up in the con­fer­ence room.

A sec­ond quote from Mike:

Learn to rec­og­nize which parts of your game and player­base aren’t impor­tant. Your favorite part of the game may be some­thing the player­base doesn’t care about, and there are some play­ers who care about things that it isn’t in your best inter­ests to focus on.

- link

As he points out, this could be per­ceived as a ‘fairly sinister-sounding quote, after all.’, but it is very much worth con­sid­er­ing when ana­lyz­ing your own designs.

He breaks it down into a num­ber of impor­tant points:

1 — Know what game you’re mak­ing, and for whom
2 — Keep your design focused
3 — Mar­ket your game hon­estly
4 — Dance with the ones that brung ya

How­ever, the essen­tial point that needs to be brought up and truly under­stood is that of Fea­ture Creep.

The best way to avoid fea­ture creep is to make a firm choice as to what game you’re not mak­ing, and which audi­ence you’re not try­ing to appeal to.

Another blog that has been aA big help has been Fullbright’s blog — he has a lot of cool insight­ful posts that get to the core of what I’ve been need­ing / want­ing to ana­lyze and ‘refac­tor’ with regards to CSO’s development.

Basi­cally what it comes down to can be summed up as this:

1) I have a larger / big­ger ‘grand scheme’ of what I want to accom­plish than is fea­si­ble given the resources that have been ded­i­cated to the project. Being able to look at a design real­is­ti­cally is always impor­tant, but equally difficult.

Full­bright sug­gest run­ning designs through what he calls the “3 R’s of Game Design”.

2) The ‘big con­cept’ has mul­ti­ple game modes, each with poten­tially their own inter­face / con­trol scheme and devel­op­ment require­ments. There was an excel­lent arti­cle (that I can’t find the link for again unfor­tu­nately) that cov­ered this topic bet­ter than I will be able to, but suf­fice it to say, that for each unique game mode that a game has, pro­duc­tion increases in dif­fi­culty. I’m still look­ing for the arti­cle because it was very insight­ful and helped me alot, but in the mean time…

This all brings me to the point of this post. As I have been devel­op­ing the var­i­ous fea­tures of the game, as per the design spec, I’ve been fairly pleased with how they have come along — but when look­ing at the game as a whole, it’s become more and more obvi­ous that instead of a sin­gle over­ar­ch­ing (and more impor­tantly, uni­fied) game, I have, effec­tively, 3 pro­to­types of var­i­ous ele­ments of a game. I could fea­si­bly break each of the 3 game modes into stand-alone games, each with their own devel­op­ment effort.

Let’s look through Fullbright’s R’s as a way of ana­lyz­ing this:

Restraint

Restraint is the act of resist­ing the urge to throw in every idea you have sim­ply because it sounds cool, awe­some, or hilarious.

Rigor

Rigor is applied through the act of objec­tively and deeply con­sid­er­ing the prac­ti­cal impli­ca­tions of an idea. No design ele­ment is an island– in fact, almost every design ele­ment is con­nected to every other by a com­plex web of dependencies.

Ratio­nale

If Restraint ques­tions the “what” of your idea, and Rigor ques­tions the “how,” then Ratio­nale ques­tions the “why.” Does this idea fit into the broader expe­ri­ence– the iden­tity of the game­world, the con­ceits of the fic­tion? What is your jus­ti­fi­ca­tion for this thing’s existence?

So, to fin­ish up before I bore every­one even worse than I have already, the short ver­sion of the story is that over the past month (or so) been tak­ing a look at what I have cre­ated to date and run­ning each and every thing through the R’s.

At this point I can say that I have fig­ured out what the short-term focus is going to be — of course this does mean that I’m poten­tially shelv­ing some of the things that I’ve imple­mented already, but that’s all it is — it doesn’t mean that they can’t resur­face in later phases of the game and/or as new games.

I’ve also been fol­low­ing the tri­als and tribu­la­tions that the devel­op­ers over at Zero­Point have been hav­ing while they try to cre­ate Inter­stel­lar Marines. I am par­tic­u­larly inter­ested in the approach that they have decided to take with the pro­duc­tion of the full game. Instead of cre­at­ing some­thing that is grandious, requires going off to the lab for 3 years with noth­ing to show for it until it’s finally done, they have started to pro­duce smaller ‘snap­shots’ of the game and (more impor­tantly I believe), actu­ally get them out as playable, released mini-games along the way. Very inspir­ing and has given me alot of ideas as to an approach that will work well for CSO as well.

More soon…

Related posts:

1. Char­ac­ter Customization
2. rts game­play, phase 2
3. Game­play Modes, Brain­storm­ing Co-op
4. Mul­ti­player Alpha
5. And now for some­thing com­pletely different…