Effective talk: Dealing with scope creep
Year of Talk: 2018
The presentor mentions how when originally working on their first game Gunpoint they had mentioned that they planned on taking between 6-12 months to make the game. It ended up taking about three (3) years of weekends to have it done.
When they started to work on their next game Heat Signature in Game Maker they had a similar idea of not taking too long to make the game. It ended up taking him over 3 years of full-time work to release the game.
This was principally due to scope creep occurring during production. And also being unable to appropriately determine the amount of time it would take to finish their games.
The main argument that Tom (The presenter) makes is that it can be hard to know exactly how long things might take if you dont have experience in it. So the only solution is prototyping to have a better idea of whether it can work or not.
Gunpoint:
When initially starting work on Gunpoint the dev wanted to make a game about robots in space but later on changed it to be a detective that can jump long distances. As a fan of Deus Ex, he also wanted to see what other features he could include in the game. This included a hacking system to allow for a new way to play through the game/level.
By using this hacking mechanic as well as some previous experience he had making levels for Quake where he would allow players to try to figure out how doors and levers interact. This meant that players could easily think of unique solutions to a level with the rewiring and hacking system.
This prototyping allowed the dev to easily understand what the game of Gunpoint was meant to be, which is a puzzle game about rewiring and not being detected. Allowing for work on levels to start quickly and expand the hacking system. Even though the hacking system and some of the hacking mechanics ended up being part of scope creep it was because many of these mechanics ended up making sense as they helped define the game even more as well as not sacrifice any other game mechanics.
The main design theme for the game was to test making small parts of everything and determine what were the more interesting areas. But this can be a problem as some game mechanics might end up causing more harm during development.
Heat Signature:
An example of working on small parts of too many things became a problem during the development of Heat Signature. The game's initial idea was to have ships that could enter other ships. Though it wasn't a lot of information on whether or not it could be considered a good game. The only option was to spend more time developing the game and the mechanics to even be able to determine how good of a game it could be.
This ended up being a lot of extra development time spent just to have a basic prototype ready and see its plausibility. Which can be inconvenient if you dont have a lot of time or resources to spend doing so. It is usually better to determine what is the minimum needed to see if the game is going to be fun.
During this early development phase of Heat Signature, he wasn't able to determine a good route to go for development like his previous game so the only thing left was spending extra time working on different features. Including a basic story, a universe being used as an unlockable tech tree, and other features. But not where able to fully help make the game way better or funner to play.
Even after adding some of these features it wouldn't help answer a lot of the questions and require other features to be worked on and implemented to better determine whether or not the game would be fun enough to play and worthwhile work to do.
After some time they realized that they needed to refocus on the initial gameplay feature for the game, that being the ship boarding and fighting inside the ship. This included a lot of features that were initially intended for the game but hadn't been implemented as time was being spent in other areas. But as this occurred the game's playability improved drastically as more of the unique play styles were similar to Gunpoint while also making the game drastically more entertaining. Simply because the main gameplay loop was always intended to be the internal ship combat and the rest was flavor to help explain why the player was going from ship to ship. But this conclusion occurred after around 2.5 years of development which meant that there was some time that could not been spent on the scope creep of the universe and instead on improving the ship combat.
Conclusion:
The question of ‘What is most needed for a game?’ can be the wrong way to get to the conclusion. This is down to the fact that a game might need a lot of information or mechanics to help make sense to the players. But it doesn't help determine what makes the game fun to play/watch. It is still useful to keep yourself honest with the question but it shouldn't be the driving question for developers.
The better question to help with development is determining the core mechanics of the game. If you can understand what makes the game playable and even more entertaining. This also is meant to help guide you towards the parts of the game the players are meant to be interacting the most with and to make sure they work properly.
A good follow-up question when working on the core of the game is to ask what happens if the mechanic isn't in the game or isn't highly polished. Will it ruin the game in the end or will it be good enough for players? An example with Heat Signature would be the flying mechanics as it doesn't have to be super detail. At the same time, it is principally meant to be a way to get from space stations to the spaceships to board and interact with the core gameplay loops.
This was useful for the presenter to discover as he starts working on prototypes alone and only brings people on when a good gameplay prototype is made.
The process he plans on following and could be useful for other solo devs is as follows:
Game ideas that are easy and quick to prototype
Find and make the important parts first.
What part of the current prototype might be best suited to be the core gameplay loop?
Add more detail towards that direction as it is important to flesh out the best possible versions of the gameplay mechanics surrounding that area. Also, make ok/good systems surrounding that to help guide the player to the core mechanics.
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