Hacker News Reader

Comment by nostromo | Hacker News Reader

You've missed the word "prototype".

The point isn't to have a perfect game at the end of the period, it's to have something to validate further time investment.

Take a look at the game Braid from prototype/concept to finished product.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Braid-art-1.jpg

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Braid-art-2.jpg

This article is about how to get to something like the first image up and running. If it's fun, then work on making it look like the second image.

View on HN

The first image still has lots of details in it. I've seen prototypes where everything was either black or green, no gradients no nothing - even the main character was a square!

This reminds me of some very early prototype screenshots from Path of Exile that they released a while ago (long after everything was polished and prettified).

https://p7p4m6s5.ssl.hwcdn.net/public/chris/old/1.jpg

(Source: https://www.pathofexile.com/forum/view-thread/445682)

The guys from DrinkBox Studios have recently published the first pitch video from their current game Severed that was sent around internally after they finished their last game. That’s also an example for a huge leap from concept/idea to finished product.

Pitch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KmFWw3ooDk4

Release Trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CIP35f_SbPI

And you've missed my point entirely. You can have a game that simply _isn't fun, until the point of it actually being polished._

Can you give an example? (I don't mean to be snarky but I'm actually curious)

The Stanley Parable? I mean, without the script and voice acting, it would seem pretty dull.

Wouldn't you prototype the script? Just having a stage direction [SOMETHING WEIRD HAPPENS] would work in lieu of transforming a 3D environment.

I bet you could protoype The Stanly Parable in a week in Twine/Z-code.

That game went through so many revisions and prototypes. I remember playing an early version which was just a HL2 mod, barely resembling the current incarnation.

Dark Souls, maybe. Without the polish I can't imagine it would be more frustrating than fun.

Not at the prototype level where you don't care about balance issues but rather gameplay mechanics.

Point and click adventure games seem like a good example - the mechanics for these are usually a pretty small part of what makes them fun. Awesome and polished art, sound, plot etc. are what matter.

That isn't true. No sane company will polish a game before knowing for certain the gameplay mechanics and art direction are final. It just costs incredible amounts of money to pivot at that point so nobody does it.

Heck the projects that yielded the best games where I previously worked at were those who'd iterate like crazy on the prototype until they get down the gameplay mechanics, then throw it all away and start developing the real game sitting on that knowledge.

Polish will make a game better but it won't make it go from boring to fun.

It's a half truth. You can be sitting at a plateau in terms of how the game is percieved until you add a key piece of tech or a particular asset. Ideally, you can prove 100% of the concept in a preproduction state, where everything is functional but placeholder. That is not hard to achieve at small scopes. Sometimes you end up needing to go a little farther, though, as the aesthetics do make a tangible difference. It takes good design skills to know how well developed the concept is, and for really tech-driven stuff you have to try building it to understand it.

That said, it also depends on what elements are critical to the design goals. If you're driven by writing, you had better already have a novel or two of drafts already written before you sink any budget into it. If you're going for a tight set of action mechanics, expect to spend a long time looking at a prototype with a bunch of colored shapes.

There are many stories of wasted work in AAA, and a lot of it stems from being too hasty to pull the trigger on production and expecting the people making work at final quality to pull rabbits out of hats and fill in a lot of missing blanks as they go along, only to be sent back to the start for a retake of entire scenes.

Eeeeeh, "final" is such a strong word. They won't (or shouldn't) spend much time polishing assets before they've sufficiently tested out (and polished) the core gameplay. But yeah, they shouldn't invest too much until they're confident that the game's going in the right direction.

The core essence of a video game is the game feel (which not everyone likes, because it's ill-defined). How does a player interact with a game? Via game mechanics. No amount of polish is going to make up for horrible game mechanics.

Jan Willem (of Vlambeer), who hates the phrase "game feel", talks about it through a simple iterative process of improving game mechanics. See: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AJdEqssNZ-U

Reply on news.ycombinator.com