Planning a Game – Things You Might Miss

When trying to plan the development of a game it can be hard to account for everything you’re going to need to do over the course of the project. Breaking down the mechanics into manageable tasks can be a hassle in and of itself, but even more so the not so obvious interactions that surround them. I wanted to cover a few of the things that have caused me issues in the past, so that you can be prepared and incorporate these concepts into your long term plans and not get blindsided when things take longer than you thought they would.

Design Testing

Testing during development in general is time consuming and cumbersome, but with games it can be easy to underestimate the amount of time you need to spend testing. While traditional development testing is still important, the most important testing you’ll perform are those which test the actual mechanics and gameplay of the game. This means that you let players try the game early on in development to identify weaknesses and find elements of the game that are confusing or misleading. The data you collect from these tests are what guides the direction of the game and what changes need to be made in order to improve them. Games made in isolation usually turn out very poorly and can be difficult to understand as they were never made with someone who wasn’t familiar with the inner workings of the systems in mind. By testing early and often throughout the development process, you can consistently improve your game and generate helpful feedback and insight into your mechanics.

This testing can be fairly quick, or it can take many hours or even days depending on the scale and number of people you’re trying to test, but it is something that you should always make time for while developing your project. It’s easy to push it to the side when timelines are tight, but proper testing will improve your project and save you time in the long run by identifying problems early on in the development and design process.

Menus

Menus are another system that’s easy to forget and push back when time is scarce and things are being rushed to completion. I’ve experienced this first hand where it kept getting put off for game mechanics and no one ever took charge of it so we ended up having no menus less than two days before we were supposed to submit feature complete. That was a long 48 hours of our whole team coming together to develop a UI system and we were working down to the last minute. Looking back on this experience has shown me that not only was this part of the project poorly managed, but the reality is that without menus your game is functionally unusable by anyone outside of the project. Without menus to guide and manage the user’s interaction with the system, they really have no idea of how to interact with the game and having no menus for so long meant our testers couldn’t really interact with the systems like they were supposed to when we launched the final product. This meant we were missing out on valuable information in terms of how players interacted with the game and we were rushed into implementing things at the last minute. Basic menu interaction isn’t generally that difficult so getting a basic usable menu system working early on will be a great help to both your testers and your team over the course of the project.

Tutorializaiton

One of the biggest issues with rushed and poorly polished games is the lack of guidance and tutorialization. Oftentimes since we as developers are so close to the game, we don’t realize how unintuitive some of the game mechanics or systems might be. Testing can help identify these issues, but the reality is that once your game is launched and out in the open, you’re not going to be there to help people if they get stuck. Often this gets overlooked or simply pushed back since game mechanics can change so often and making tutorials for each iteration would be wasted effort, but it’s important to make sure you have time towards the end of your development process to create proper guides and visual aids to help the player figure out what they’re supposed to do. A great game lacking tutorial elements can cause people to get frustrated and quit well before they actually get to experience the game you created.

As a side note, even games like Dark Souls, which are notorious for being punishing and not holding hands, have tutorial elements in the little messages that are left on the ground. If even a game designed to be hardcore and unforgiving has guides for players, you might want to think about dedicating some time into helping players learn your game.

Integration

The last point I wanted to address is the time it takes to integrate various systems together into a single level or experience. Many of these systems are made in isolation and if you’re on a team, then they’re often made by different people with different plans for how everything should work. Unless you spend an extreme amount of time planning out interfaces and interactions between systems before you start developing, there’s always going to be bugs and issues when trying to get systems to work together. In my experience this always takes longer than anyone on the team thinks it will, and often ends up with long nights before deadlines fighting to get everything together at the last minute. Dedicating some time to make sure that everything comes together and interacts the way it should can save the whole team a lot of headaches and panic in the long run, and will likely lead to better results in the end because the solutions won’t be rushed.