This is part 3 of the Game Design Methodology series. You can find the series overview at Game Design Methodology.
This article is the logical follow up to part 2 of the series. If you haven’t seen it yet please check it out here iteration.
We have discussed some aspects of iteration. The speed at which you should iterate is a large enough topic we will dedicate this article to it.
In the video below, I use John Conway’s game of life as a rough analogy to patterns player’s follow while using a game’s rule set. It does a reasonably good job of visualizing the concepts we are discussing.
Specifically we cover how to know:
How to try our best to succeed or fail fast
What happens to player patterns when you make changes
If you are iterating too quickly
If you are iterating too slowly
Iterating at the right speed will help maximize the development time the project has.
If you want to try out the version of Conway’s Game of Life I used in the video, you can find it here:
Next Up
You can find the next article in the series here: The Vision.
Iteration Speed