Ever been in a situation where you and your group of friends
are deciding where to eat but everyone want something different? Well, I can
say having many opinions is much better than having none. You might start
wondering how does this relate to game development. The fact is that this type
of situation happens all the time, especially here at Imagiro Studios, let me
explain further.
When we decide to initiate a new project, we have no idea of
what to do exactly (yes, we actually have no good ideas when we start out any
project) and we go through intense brainstorming sessions. One of the first
things we decide on is game genre and anything related to that topic, things
like mechanics, suitable platform,
design elements are some of the things that fall under that topic, but we will
be focusing on game genre as the main discussion point today.
So why talk about game genre? Why is it so important? And
how does it impact the future? Well, the answer to these are simple, why NOT
talk about it? why is it NOT important? and how does it NOT impact the future?
Game genre decision is one of the key things that we decide on in project
meetings and the time we spend on it
shows how important it is in our development process. The logic behind our
process is to go from a top-down view or generic to specific, we start out
forming a generic direction of where we want to go and then narrow things down
until we paint a clear picture of what the end product should look like. As you
can see, game genre is essential because it is the first step taken in this
process and essentially decides how subsequent decisions are made. Now we don't
expect everyone to plan projects this way, it is just something that we are
accustomed to using. You might initiate projects based on an awesome idea, or
you could be creative and tweak other games out there to become a unique entity
of your own. Whatever way works for you, that should be the way you proceed.
For us, we like the systematic approach to development, one step at a time and
fully explore our options at each step. You can almost think about it like
taking different parts from various machines and piecing it together along with
something new. We haven't been doing this for very long, but we have already
gone through many ideas and ran this process at least a few dozen times. MODUS
was a product of this process, although we have gone back to make changes, it
was indeed for the better. We first started out thinking what type of game it
would be and decided to be an artillery shooter game. The reasoning was that
there wasn't that many similar games out in the market. Worms and Gunbound were
the most well known and popular but have been out of favour in recent years. It
was also something that our team had experience playing and thus knew possible
space for improvements and additions. Everything else sort of just fit into
place after we decided the game genre, it was rather intuitive since the
options where narrowed down through research and it was just a matter of
fitting the puzzles together.
As you can tell at this point, choosing the genre to pursue
is rather an important task. One has to consider the market competition,
personal experience, ways of improvement and differentiation, and ultimately
the fun factor. However, all that hard work doesn't go to waste, once you have
a good foundation with the genre the rest falls into place as you think about
it, at least you have some direction when doing research on specifics. But wait
a minute, all we talked about so far is why deciding on game genre is so
important, but we still haven't address the issue of the "how". How
does one decide on a game genre when everyone in your team have different
opinions on what they want to make? Like we said before, this occurs quite
often at Imagiro Studios due to the variety of games we play. If you are a solo
developer, mainly the programmers out there, this would not be a problem for
you because you are a team of one and you make whatever you want to make, given
that you still done your market research, have personal experience with the
genre, and knows what is fun. It is in a team environment where this problem
tend to occur. On many occasions there are so many conflicting opinions that
the whole team gets bogged down discussing about it, how we handle such
situation as well as any major decision making is to have majority vote after
considering all available factors. Although this might not be the best method,
but it does work for us. However, there are veterans of the gaming industry in
your team, then you may have one person make the decisions after considering
all valid claims by other members of the group. This is getting into more of
the business side of decision making structure, we don't want bring too much of
that aspect into the discussion so let's stop here. Overall, a group must be
able to make decisions and have everyone follow through on it. The decision
itself must be objective and not a personal favourite of the decision maker.
