meheleventyone

I was speaking about prototyping at a conference in Finland and got asked a question that left me fumbling for an answer.

“How much of my budget should I spend on prototyping?”

I’m insulated from budgets at work and don’t consider them at home. My pretty lame answer to being put-on-the-spot was that I didn’t really know and that I personally consider prototyping an incredibly important part of making anything so I would earmark a lot of budget towards it. It’s a pretty bad answer in hindsight because the most expensive parts of game development by far are content creation and marketing. Trying to place a dollar value on something like prototyping is hard as the value added is mostly a reduction in project risk. Asking “how much time and therefore money did we save by not doing something?” is equivalent to “how long is a piece of string?”

To me the value of prototyping is two-fold.

Value to the Individual

In games we’re seeking a to produce experiences that elicit emotions, the most common being enjoyment of something fun. There is no real way of knowing in advance if a game idea is fun or not or if its something you really want to make. Making videogames is an act of creation and it is a craft. Other acts of creation follow a similar pattern. Writers need to write a lot to get good at writing. Painters need to paint a lot to get good at painting. You need to knit a lot to get good at knitting. To get good at making videogames you need to make a lot of videogames. The more you explore and make things the better refined your process and skills become. You also gain a great deal of knowledge and experience which you can use as future shortcuts. Prototyping is essentially the act of making the core game experience or a feature as quickly as possible to see if it’s good or not. It follows that prototyping lots of small games, systems and other ideas is a great way to get better at making games.

Having a large portfolio of prototypes is also a great way of demonstrating a variety of skills to potential employers.

Value to the Business

As I said above the main business value of prototyping is a reduction in project risk. Early post-Waterfall methodologies noticed this for example Boehm’s Spiral Model. It’s should be pretty clear to most people that the first version of pretty much anything is terrible in at least one aspect. In the Spiral Model development doesn’t move through a series of stages ala Waterfall but in a series of iterations that result in a series of prototypes before the product is finally put into production. It recognizes that we can’t effectively reason about an idea without a concrete implementation. Project risk can be mitigated with prototyping in a few ways:

• “Fail fast” – Today’s trendy business phrase. But as above there is real value in realizing early that you shouldn’t do something and not wasting resources chasing it in a heavyweight fashion until your realize it is unworkable or rubbish.
• Improving communication – Ever sat in a meeting room to discuss a design document and found you spent the entire meeting squaring away different interpretations of the doc? Text is a horrible way to communicate ideas about a game which is a complex, interactive, aural and visual experience. You can see this in the drift as a younger generation rely on Let’s Play videos more than traditional journalism to make purchasing decisions. Simply watching someone play the game tells you more about it than the reviewers opinion of the experience put into print. The same is true for prototypes, they give a concrete entity for demonstration, reasoning and discussion.
• Expose unknowns – Upfront design has long been fraught if you only have a muddy picture of your requirements. Nothing can get much muddier than games where the game at the end can often bear little resemblance to the initial idea. Prototyping at least gives you some insight into what the unknowns will be.
• Avoiding “Sunk Cost” – Avoiding the sunk cost fallacy is at its heart not “throwing good money, after bad” or better still knowing when to kill a project despite having a large amount of money invested in it. Developing concrete prototypes makes evaluating the project much easier.

There is also less tangible value added by keeping prototyping in mind. Businesses are beginning to realize that like a server a person can’t run at a hundred percent capacity without loosing overall efficiency over time. Google made the practice famous but a whole variety of companies are letting employees take charge of a percentage of their work time. For example here at CCP on the EVE project we have twenty percent of our working time available for our own projects. It’s the lowest priority work and entirely optional but it’s there and people use it. Beyond providing a buffer for work tasks that take longer than expected it also makes sure teams aren’t burning themselves out. Encouraging prototyping in this time has a couple of benefits. Firstly the business can discover new business opportunities. For CCP that paid off in a big way with EVE: Valkyrie, even if the initial prototype hadn’t been greenlit into development the visibility raised must of been worth many times more in equivalent marketing spend than it cost the company. Granted the core team that made the initial prototype eventually put way more of their own hours into the project but it’s an interesting example of these things “going wild” and surprising the executive staff. Secondly it helps keep people motivated, no one enjoys drudge work but it often has to be done and spending a few hours each week on something you find exciting is good compensation.

Whilst I wouldn’t expect prototyping efforts to spin off new products regularly they do also give the business a bunch of products with some ground work already done they could evaluate and invest in when it comes time to do so. Hopefully this sort of culture will experience less downtime between projects and less project risk by having to start all the investigation of multiple ideas from scratch.

Finally the value added by each individual getting better at their craft is not only a tangible benefit to that individual but to the company as a whole.

How much of my budget should I spend on prototyping?

Let’s revisit the initial question. Prototyping is a tool to investigate and conquer the unknown so the budget requirement comes down to how well you really know what you want to make. I guess the answer I’m shooting for now is make it a significant part of your process, especially at project conception and during pre-production.