Video game development

[bd648]

stage directions? cool. always the best way to be. you gonna use foley or preexisting sfx?

[Thor]

As someone who works in the video game industry right now:

-Gameplay is god. Art and music is secondary. Make your gameplay fun with boxes and placeholder art first, then worry about the art later. (once your gameplay is down, set up the architecture so that you can hire an artist to plug in stuff later. For example, set up the programming with placeholder art for calling in a character's run cycles, get that working, then hire an artist to draw out the frames later)

(we call these placeholders "stubs" by the way)

-Know your ABC's: Even the biggest teams need to prioritize features. For smaller projects, list out all the tasks you'll need to do to make a game and then hit the most important stuff first:

A level tasks: Your game will not function without this. Movement code, collision detection, attack code, basic UI elements, MINUTE TO MINUTE GAMEPLAY (VERY IMPORTANT), etc.
B level tasks: This will make a huge impact on the gameplay but ultimately isn't needed. Art and music actually fall into here (because you should be able to play the game with all different colored boxes). Stubs/placeholder art typically fall in here, but only if they provide gameplay feedback
C level tasks: All icing on the cake. Animated UI elements, camera shake, lens flares, cinematics


Get your A level stuff done first, then your B level stuff, then if you have time, your C level stuff

this is all I can think of right now but feel free to hit me up with any questions otherwise

[basketweaver]

Thanks, Thor. What exactly do you mean by minute-to-minute gameplay?

[rtil]

As someone who works in the video game industry

will this be on your tombstone?

[Thor]

As someone who works in the video game industry

will this be on your tombstone?

Thanks, Thor. What exactly do you mean by minute-to-minute gameplay?

minute to minute gameplay as in how exactly you want your game to go when a player's playing it. How should a player feel when playing it? Do you want an easy going side scroller that's mostly story driven? Do you want a really twitch based bullet hell sidescroller where the player regularly needs to dodge around and jump? What are the important gameplay elements in your game?

From there, the design can drive the art. Mirror's Edge, for example, colors all of the interactable environmental elements red to draw your attention to it against a mostly cold palette. For Infinite Crisis, because we had so many effects that we needed to provide gameplay feedback for, we came up with a color language of sorts: we made all "negative" looking effects dark purple, all healing effects green and white, all poison effects dark green and yellow, physical attacks were red and gold and magic/power attacks were blue (there were exceptions of course). Perhaps in your side scroller, yellow platforms maybe break 2 seconds after your character jump on them, green platforms serve as healing areas-- regardless of what your gameplay is, designing the art to provide gameplay feedback will help out your players' overall experience a ton (I once heard a story about one of the earlier FPS games (I believe it was Unreal edit: whoops, it was Bulletstorm) where the artists tried to make their exploding barrels green but playtesters never used them because they didn't know they would explode. Once they made the barrels red, more of their playtesters started shooting more of the exploding barrels in the game)

Also, I saw a talk at the Boston Festival of Indie Games given by one of the heads of That Game Company (the guys behind Journey) and the overall message of the lecture was "Keep to a feeling throughout the entire process"

They wrote down what they wanted the feeling of the game to be for Journey down on a big ol' whiteboard (just a sentence), and whenever they had a question about gameplay or art, they asked themselves if what they were working on helped push towards that thing they wrote down

As someone who works in the video game industry

will this be on your tombstone?

Not that, it'd probably be something a bit more profound like "feeerrrt"

Actually I'll take sausage and caramelized onions OH WHAT A 90s REFERENCE?!

[basketweaver]

Thanks for the post Thor. I totally agree with your post about minute-to-minute game design and didn't know that it was a word. I had kinda been using the ad hoc phrase "gameplay flow" which probably doesn't mean what I want it to mean. I'll definitely keep what you said in mind.

[basketweaver]

Also:

They wrote down what they wanted the feeling of the game to be for Journey down on a big ol' whiteboard (just a sentence), and whenever they had a question about gameplay or art, they asked themselves if what they were working on helped push towards that thing they wrote down

Can you give an example of what you mean by "feeling"? Like:

"It should be smooth"?

"You should feel very heavy while moving"?

"You should feel like the world is very big"?

[Thor]

Can you give an example of what you mean by "feeling"? Like:

"It should be smooth"?

"You should feel very heavy while moving"?

"You should feel like the world is very big"?

This is where I wish I could remember what the lady giving the presentation said exactly. I know I helped shoot a video for that talk so I'll contact a friend who helped organize it to see if that video is online (as my google fu is turning up nothing)

But the "feeling" here is really a very high-level design goal-- these shouldn't directly describe gameplay, but gameplay should help create this. For Journey it could have been something like "Create a sense of wonderment through exploration and cooperation"


Throwing out other examples here: "Create a sense of urgent need and panic through a lack of resources," or "Make the act of building and creating satisfactory," or "Make the player love the light and hate the dark"

[basketweaver]

Thanks, makes sense.