This is part 2 of the Game Design Methodology series. You can find the series overview at Game Design Methodology.
In the video, I discuss that for many games, we scheduled the entire game packed full of features without really scheduling in dedicated time for iteration. It usually was an unspoken activity that got lumped into time set aside for testing. Even during test, many times the thought was to either code freeze or go for stretch goals with that time.
Over time, I’ve grown an understanding that iteration is actually more important than you or me in the development process. As an individual designer, we lack the varied approaches to a game other players in our target market will try.
The reality that we've found is that the more times you can iterate, the closer you can get to the actual game experience.
To think you can hit your exact goals for a game with no iteration or feedback is hopeful at best.
What do you need to iterate
To truly understand the importance of iteration, we have to know how to iterate.
And we need five things to iterate.
We need to know is what success looks like.
We need good test data.
We need a lot of test data.
We need a way to interpret the data.
We need a good way to change the product to get closer to the result we want.
AI
Right now in 2023, AI is one of the hottest topics around. Many people seem worried about the impact AI will have on the world.
What's it going to take over? How smart can it get?
In the video we will be covering how AI learns and what impact it has even though It has no consciousness or spark of intelligence. We will discuss how AI has the potential of replacing those that don’t bring something to the table.
Our advantages
We will cover some of the distinct advantages designers have over AI and how we can use that to outperform it, at least for today.
We will discuss:
• Ways we can iterate early and which areas are right areas to focus on.
• When it is ok to throw away work and to have the courage to do so.
• How to think wider by putting into perspective what we are delivering.
• Additional ways to get feedback beyond tracking in-game actions and statistics.
• That we know what fun is.
Utilize this information to help innovate and be an amazingly creative designer who makes world changing titles.
Next Up
You can find the next article in the series here: Iteration Speed.
Iteration