Crawford On Making Balance Of Power

Thanks to an anonymous reader for pointing to GameDev.net's excerpt from the new Chris Crawford On Game Design book, in which the famed strategy game creator and writer of The Art of Computer Game Design discusses the development of his classic '80s cold-war strategy game Balance Of Power, from initial concepts ("A game, like a story, must have a conflict") through execution ("Polish, polish, polish! Take a minimum of six months after alpha for polishing.")

Comments

6 months of improvement?

[ObviousGuy]

And risk running out of funds? That's a bad way to go about it.

Here's the short, fun way:

1) Come up with great game idea
2) Draw ideas up in PowerPoint
3) Present ideas with any working demos or mockups to investors
4) Get money (PROFIT!)
5) Develop game to Alpha stage
6) Release and gauge market response
7) Continue improving game if market likes it, drop development like a hot potato if the market thinks your idea sucks
8) ???

Blood Sweat and Tears

[Big Sean O]

Great article.

Crawford did some great stuff back when b&w bitmaps were considered state-of-the-art graphics. I remember his games fondly.

I think some of Crawford's games would do well today. I'd love to get a version of Balance of Power that would run on Mac OS X.

His advice is pretty spot on as well. Of course, on Internet Time 6 months to polish is simply not realistic. The advice is clear: a good game is simple, but not trivial to create.