The term “fantasy” seems like it’s being thrown around a lot these days in the indie game dev space. Game devs (myself included) ask each other “What is the player fantasy you are fulfilling?” in order to get a quick understanding of what a game is about. If the other person doesn’t have a good answer, it is often recommended that they go and figure that out first. Honestly, I categorize this advice next to “make small games” and “make a good game first” in terms of immediate usefulness. These types of maxims tend to leave me with more questions about what I should do with the information, until I forget about them and rediscover Jonas Tyroller’s video again a month later and start the process over.
After getting through Operation B.U.G.S. with Pi and seeing the analytics (not good), I knew that we needed to invest in a stronger framework for kicking off our own projects. Even though we are still focused on prototyping, there were clear problems with our development process. Many of the issues we ran into came down to dependencies and a general lack of shared understanding. These are all issues I’ve seen professional software development teams struggle with time and time again. During the break between projects, I sat down to think through how I might start to synthesize a bunch of ideas into an actionable experiment that we could run. I wanted to approach making a game differently to see if it could lead to better outcomes.
Here are the resources and people that served as inspiration for what I eventually synthesized (in the video, I definitely forgot one VERY IMPORTANT person, so I’ll reconcile that now by including him in this list. Sorry, Ben!):
In this studio session, I want to bring you inside my mind and break down my current outlook on how I think teams can work together to form a shared understanding of a game. By using this process and being honest about the success and failure criteria, I believe that teams will feel more confident in the decisions they make upon reaching the “go”/”no go” milestone of a project.
Working as a team is difficult. Making a video game is difficult. Anything we can do to facilitate better means of collaboration will help increase the likelihood that the vision we start with will become what players experience. This framework is still very fresh and in development, but I hope you enjoy this studio session and find it useful. Send me a reply or use my contact form if you want to get a copy of my notes!
Talk soon,
Connor
