Concepting and prototyping allows developers to cheaply explore a design space in order to find the nuggets of gameplay that can be polished to a high sheen. The single biggest issues are the size of this design space and the efficiency with which you can explore it. Roughly speaking we want to explore as much of the design space as possible as quickly as possible. There are two good routes to this; defining good constraints and working in parallel.
Good Constraints
Limiting the size of the design space is something you want to do for a whole variety of reasons:
- To match company vision and goals.
- To tackle specific problems.
- To meet the abilities of the staff you have.
The single most important reason for defining clear constraints is to aid creativity. It’s simply easier to think through choices when they are limited. Constraints don’t need to be externally imposed nor do they need to be shared between teams working on new concepts. They do however, need to be good constraints. So what is a good constraint at this stage in the production lifecycle? It’s a constraint that can act as a quick razor to dismiss ideas. For example:
- Genre.
- Functionality requirements.
- Team size and experience.
Bad constraints are not invalid constraints but ones that are more complex questions where the answers are unclear this early in the project. A good example would be setting a deadline, for example this product must ship within 18 months. There is almost certainly a constraint on the amount of time a project can take to make it to market in a business but estimates of this at an early stage in a project are going to be completely wrong. People deal with unpredictable things that need to fit into a fixed timescale by being extremely conservative, which is probably not something you want at this stage in a project where there should be maximum creative scope.
Go Wide
It’s a truism that it’s quicker to explore a space by splitting up and taking different sections. Double Fine’s Amnesia Fortnight is a good example of how this might work in practice within a small/medium sized company. Likewise Vlambeer demonstrate that even as a tiny studio by severely limiting the amount of time you spend on a prototype you can hit many different ideas including some that become successes. In an ideal reality concepts should be something that are being developed all the time. Who doesn’t have a book of design ideas juggling around in their head or transferred to paper? Creating a prototype is more time consuming but critically allows a better understanding of how well the proposed idea meets the constraints and how feasible it is for a given team to develop. The more prototypes you can create the better you have explored the space and the more likely you’ll have come across the true maxima in that space. For larger companies it makes sense to have many small teams prototyping at once and as one or more ideas become more concretely ‘the best’ begin to structure those teams around moving them into pre-production. Sadly what you’ll mostly see are a lot of companies that have one small team working on one particular idea without really bothering to more fully explore the design space. This usually results in companies paying lip service to the production lifecycle without really buying into it because there are no real alternatives to the one project in flight.
Ideally what a developer is looking for is for the lifecycle stages to act as a funnel. As the stages are progressed you gain more information about how well the idea meets the constraints and the teams ability to implement it. So as you move through the stages ideas are discarded as they are found wanting.
meheleventyone 