Just stumbled upon this article on Gamasutra by a bunch of students from the Experimental Gameplay Project at Carnegie Mellon’s Entertainment Technology Center. It discusses the lessons they learnt from rapidly protoyping games for a whole semester (kids these days huh?). An interesting read, here’s the summary…
Setup: Rapid is a State of Mind
* Embrace the Possibility of Failure – it Encourages Creative Risk Taking
* Enforce Short Development Cycles (More Time != More Quality)
* Constrain Creativity to Make You Want it Even More
* Gather a Kickass Team and an Objective Advisor – Mindset is as Important as Talent
* Develop in Parallel for Maximum Splatter
Design: Creativity and the Myth of Brainstorming
* Formal Brainstorming Has a 0% Success Rate
* Gather Concept Art and Music to Create an Emotional Target
* Simulate in Your Head – Pre-Prototype the Prototype
Development: Nobody Knows How You Made it, and Nobody Cares
* Build the Toy First
* If You Can Get Away With it, Fake it
* Cut Your Losses and “Learn When to Shoot Your Baby in the Crib”
* Heavy Theming Will Not Salvage Bad Design (or “You Can’t Polish a Turd”)
* But Overall Aesthetic Matters! Apply a Healthy Spread of Art, Sound, and Music
* Nobody Cares About Your Great Engineering
General Gameplay: Sensual Lessons in Juicy Fun
* Complexity is Not Necessary for Fun
* Create a Sense of Ownership to Keep ‘em Crawling Back for More
* “Experimental” Does Not Mean “Complex”
* Build Toward a Well Defined Goal
* Make it Juicy!
See now that’s interesting. I find a lot of us developers are shut out of this early stage of the project with regards to commercial work. Particularly with pitch work and we therefore with the people who pitch doing one of two things;
either:
a) waving their arms around wildly with lots of enthusiasm until the client comes up with their own ideas. (Adz, you know what I’m talking about)
or:
b) showing them an existing game/ site / application and basically saying ‘it’s like this but with your logo/ theme / character slapped onto it.
Cool finding though…