Update 04/15/2020Sorry for late update. Got too involved with development.
Last week I spent quite sometime refining my
game design document. I find game design (every aspect from mechanics to level design to balancing the game economy) to be very difficult. In my mind its a difference between making the player feel good about themselves or leaving them with a feeling that they are stupid or you are a money hogger developer. In either case you lose.
ResearchThis is the most critical part of entire game development and decided everything for me, from genre to art to mechanics.
Initially the idea of bumpy was very similar to Hill Climb Racing. It sounded exciting and something I would like to play. I did a lot of research, played about 35-40 other games in the endless running genre. Read comments about each game to see why people liked/disliked a particular game. Based on all the data I collected, I realized that a endless chase game was the way to go. It was easy to make players feel good about themselves when they kill an enemy and get coins. There was no level design i.e. I can have procedural levels. I spent about 1 month just on this part.
KISS (Keep is simple, stupid)I am sure you have heard this over and over again. My goal was to keep is simple to an extent that the previous generation would be able to play this game without enough hand holding. Even with the above research and narrow scope, I still had hundreds of ideas about the game mechanics. Keep the main goal of simplicity in mind, I wrote the initial
game design document. Feel free to read through it if you'd like
Game design documentWhile writing document is the most boring tasks, I have realized that it really helps a scatter brain person like me to create or define a path I want to take. The path may or may not be right (depends on your research) but it helps me stay focused, the lack of which is the reason many projects never see the light.
I found a lot of templates online and just followed it through. I made tens of different iterations based on ideas. However, the one critical input I was missing was the constraint of time. I finally created a game design document that would enable me to create a prototype in 2 weeks to test it out. Using my development experience I was able to ball park the estimates
(which was quite off - probably a post for next time). This also made sure that the mechanics were dead simple and I removed all the fat. I identified the core game mechanic and game play loop and wrote great details about it. Note that this was done over weeks rather than one sitting, but next time I will probably flush it out much in advance before starting development.
PrototypeYou have the document ready. However just giving the document is not the best way to get the feedback. Everyone interprets words in their own way. Showing a prototype on the other hand narrows that gap significantly. Paper prototypes have rarely worked for me because users do not seem to be too engaged. And this prototype was only 2 weeks. So in grand scheme of things, this was very small time investment with huge return.
The key here is to keep true to the document and not deviate unless there is a major flaw in the design. It is very tempting to keep changing and adjusting your prototype on new ideas. But this will get you into the phase of never ending development.
FeedbackSo now you have done your research, have a game design document and made a prototype. Now what? You have to validate everything you did so far. You have to take feedback from your users. I have a
post on user feedback and I urge you to read it.
For the next update, I will focus on finding talent online to help you create your game
Note: If you have suggestion on what to cover or how I can improve this dev log, do let me know.Website |
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