Prototyping 50 Games in One Semester

StarEmperor writes "Gamasutra has a good feature about four grad students who created 50 games in one semester. The article presents their insights about game design, evaluating gameplay, and generally what makes for a fun game."

Comments

I've got a fever & the only prescription is mo

[peipas]

...storyline. Grim Fandango, for instance, is one of the most amazing games I've played. It has a great story, a unique style, and hilarious bits thrown in here and there. Being able to interact with a story can be brilliant; I think this is where some of the Final Fantasy series' popularity comes from.

Do It Again

[mpapet]

I'm always happy to see stories like this. There are huge gaps in entertainment for low dev costs and this is how you make them fly.

-No, your games aren't going to be in WorstBuy anytime soon.
-No, your games aren't going to get any attention whatsoever from the media.
-No, you won't be able to afford porting them to the console du-jour.
-No, you won't attract VC to grow your business.

-Yes, you will have some loyal consumers. Make your games multilingual (i18?) and you'll have many.
-Yes, you can build a very successful enterprise.

In all cases that's the way doing something original works. I wish more young Americans had this kind of attitude and perserverance.

I just hope they are smart enough to keep going on their own instead of using it as a resume builder.

Re:Do It Again

[KDR_11k]

The gameplay got better over time as the tolerance for bad design choices went down. These days it's unacceptable to require the player to find secrets with no hint towards them or have huge mazes without any map function. It's unacceptable to kill the player with traps he can't see coming to force trial and error or to make progressing through the game impossible because the player failed to get some object that he can no longer access. Outside of retro-styled games there is no massive death penalty in RPGs (died? Sorry, you lose all items and experience) and mindless grinding is much less common (outside of MMORPGs, at least). Yes, some people whine that this made games too easy but it's entirely possible to make a game difficult without resorting to massively cheap crap. Oh and controls got a lot better too.

Re:Do It Again

[FunkSoulBrother]

These days it's unacceptable to require the player to find secrets with no hint towards them or have huge mazes without any map function. Really? I've found it to be more or at least as prevalent in games these days to hide secrets which are completely unsolvable without a guide. I think the developers are just assuming that kids will disseminate the information on GameFAQs or other websites. It's really a shame too, as I like to solve things myself. You can probably beat the game without any of that game guide bullshit, but you won't "100%" it.

Oh, and as far as the built in map functions these days, I liked mapmaking on graph paper, but I can concede at least that I'm a huge nerd from another generation on that one.

Re:nice try buddy

[omeomi]

And as a CS grad student, how is this different from every other semester and summer?

I've played the Tower of Goo game. It's really a fun "casual game" sort of game, and honestly, they came up with an idea that was fairly different from much of anything else out there, which isn't easy to do. They didn't just make yet another Tetris clone, or a Bejeweled clone, or some other puzzle game that's been done a million times, they seem to have tried to come up with really innovative game ideas.

The Experimental Gameplay Project has a lot of really unique game concepts like this.

This is a feature from October 26, 2005

[Anonymous Coward]

For FSM's sake! 2.5 years old.

*sigh*

Re:This is a feature from October 26, 2005

[NeutronCowboy]

And yet, it still seems relevant. What does that tell us about the current state of gaming? Put differently, should we discount the importance of Newton's Principia Mathematica because it is 400 years old?

Re:This is a feature from October 26, 2005

[steelfood]

It's relevant, certainly. But, I'll bet you'd be surprised if a /. headline read:

Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica Attempts to Explain Everyday Physical Observations and then proceeded to wonder if this book could change the field of physics forever.

On a site that's "news for nerds," events that were made public 2 years ago would hardly be called news. That, and this might just be a dupe that was spaced so far apart nobody can remember the original (worse than the dupe on SHA1 being cracked).

Re:Cheap game space

[maxume]

http://www.kongregate.com/

Desktop Tower Defense is pretty addictive (for a while anyway):

http://www.kongregate.com/games/preecep/desktop-tower-defense

Also liked this one:

http://www.kongregate.com/games/AlejandroG/spin-the-black-circle

productivity vs. burnout

[Thelasko]

This article basically says that shorter development cycles produce a better product because of diminishing returns. What it doesn't state is whether this development cycle increases or decreases the burnout rate for developers.

I think it would be a nice follow up to do an extended study of this kind of development cycle in a corporate environment and examine the turnover rate for developers. Will they be intrigued by working on something new every week, or will they get tired of the quick turnaround and quit?

Re:productivity vs. burnout

[JustinOpinion]

It's worth noting that the article is talking specifically about prototyping, not necessarily full game development. They do acknowledge that once a good idea is found, it will take some time to give it the polish and variation that people expect from a full game.

So, I wouldn't think of this as any developer's full-time job. Rather, they are describing a strategy for coming up with novel game mechanics, game genres, game elements, etc. Maybe in-between big projects, you give your designers/developers a few weeks of this kind of structured rapid prototyping. At the end, you decide which ideas are not worth pursuing, which ideas could be polished into small games (for release as flash games, as mini-games inside full games, etc.), and which ideas could be expanded upon to create a full, novel game. (E.g. the next "Portal" in terms of novel game-play.)

You're probably right that any developer would burn-out if they tried to churn out a new, novel game every week (they might also eventually become frustrated by never being able to "finish" any project). But as a way to sometimes come up with actually creative game ideas... it definitely has merit.

Re:productivity vs. burnout

[hvm2hvm]

"I think it would be a nice follow up to do an extended study of this kind of development cycle in a corporate environment and examine the turnover rate for developers. Will they be intrigued by working on something new every week, or will they get tired of the quick turnaround and quit?"
That's exactly what kills the creativity: trying to systematize creating, trying to find a perfect 'way' that will always work and ensure originality. No, it can't work and it never will as long people have deadlines or a fixed timetable. They need to be able to say no to a project and yes to another whenever they want. Otherwise they tend to become like the system itself, thinking in 'development cycles' and other bullshit. Some games take days to think of and years to create, others years of planning and thinking and relatively shorter development time.

Re:productivity vs. burnout

[sahala]

The prototyping method from the article has been around for a while at CMU, since about 1998 in a class called "Building Virtual Worlds". The whole theory is to get people to think creatively by giving them a central idea, a bunch of constraints, and an even bigger set of tools to play with.

The process is actually intended to NOT be perfect. The idea is for people to quickly design an idea, then sketch out the idea in code using prototype tools, then test it out in front of an audience, all in a week. The interesting part is when people start building on ideas from projects that are showcased. The good ideas are repeated and built on, and others are archived.

Think about this though...given a few simple constraints, you can do ANYTHING you want. It basically becomes a weekly cycle of playing, where on review the interesting parts are noted and you move on to the next play session.

I agree, some ideas take years of creating and planning, building. But, this process is never clean. The very best ideas are usually grown through quick iterations and experimentation, which Randy Pausch's process forces pretty well.

You can ask anyone who's taken "Building Virtual Worlds" or been in the ET program at CMU. They'll bitch about the crazy stunts they had to pull to get something working (imagine collision detection suddenly going kaput an hour before show-and-tell time) but there was no doubt that it was non-stop creativity.

Not exactly a dupe

[New_Age_Reform_Act]

but someone here mentioned it a loooooooooooong time ago.

http://games.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=173642&cid=14446612

"Nobody cares about your engineering..."

[SanityInAnarchy]

This is very true, for the prototype, because half of them will be thrown away.

That said, the kind of mechanic they were talking about really doesn't seem like it'd make something polished. If you already have a solid prototype, take some time to go back and do it right.

Bit old - but still important...

[angryphase]

.. to read, as this goes to show what a creative deadline can help produce. Simple, elegant games that don't require your life to play or millions to develop. In fact, they now are aiming to turn these ideas into products, for their own company.

Re:nice try buddy

[KevMar]

I have found a lot of nice gems in that project.

You do get a lot of simple or basic functionality tests, but some do have a nice polished feel.

Crayon Physics and Tower of Goo stand out the most. Every few months I download all the new games and just kill time seeing what they can do.

Re:nice try buddy

[KDR_11k]

Every game is unique but as you increase the tolerance for considering two games similar you reduce the number of unique games. Colloquially a game is "very unique" when the tolerance required to consider it similar to another game is very large.

Re:I've got a fever & the only prescription is

[apt-get moo]

Being able to interact with a story can be brilliant; I think this is where some of the Final Fantasy series' popularity comes from. I don't think so.
Most Final Fantasy titles have mediocre stories with little or no meaningful interaction, somewhat nice gameplay and plenty of slashfic featurng the lead characters.

Welcome to October 2005

[glyph42]

Seriously, guys. The article is from October 2005, you know, when the rest of the internet read it.

Re:Why no source code?

[robot_guy]

There is a bi-annual 48 hour solo game development competition called Ludum Dare 48h that has just finished its 11th incarnation. All the entries have to supply source so it might be interesting for you to have a look though these. This time there were over 70 final entries but you do have to realise that there is a wide range of polish and completeness.

The competition itself is actually quite fun and provides a good forum for playing at game development as at doesn't take up much time and the end results are not expected to be perfectly polished, complete games.