5 Project Killers: Here's Why You Never Finish Your Game Project

a huge amount of Productions never see the light of day the team is great at developing the game creating the code and characters and levels but they don't know how to actually finish the game they don't want to publish a game that is not good enough that the team is not proud of but they have no clue on how to structure the production in such a way that is more efficient for them in a way that results in a good or even a great game but it's also something that you can actually publish and it becomes profitable for the team and the company if that sounds like you or your team then I hope this video brings some good ideas for you hey guys it's Harry I've been a game designer and producer for the past 10 years and in this Channel I want to talk all about game production and that is it game production first important thing for us to understand is that effectively producing a game is not just developing the assets code and characters for it the biggest mistake I see teams making all the time especially in the teams is the belief that they can just continue creating the assets modeling the characters creating the levels and at the end somehow they're going to have a cohesive hole as a game for them to publish that is not going to happen in order to effectively produce a game you have to treat it as a product on the market you have to plan it prioritize it and schedule it and let me be honest with you if you're not doing that you're just hoping for the best and leaving too much on the table and believe me I have participated in several Productions and made all of those mistakes myself and some of them I will keep making to be honest because that's how games work sometimes but that is not an excuse for us to try and avoid the best as we can all of those mistakes okay so here are five reasons why you don't finish your game and what you should do about it reason number one you don't focus enough on your core gameplay Loop early on many teams still don't know what to do during prepar production and they just enter production just to continue creating the assets for the game without really thinking without evaluating the core that they have in hands and how to polish it the core Loop of your game are the mechanics and events that will keep happening over and over throughout the playthrough in Diablo 4 for example the loop includes receiving a Quest from an NPC going down the dungeon slaying monsters leveling up and collecting new equipment for your character what you need to understand is that each step in this Loop are the most important things for your game and they have to feel powerful and meaningful to the player cutcenes are less important doing co-op with your friends is less important collecting gems to craft better equipment is less important everything is less important if the core Loop is not solid enough and doesn't make the player feel powerful and smart that is why you have to find and nurture your core Loop early on after all the core Loop of your game is the MVP the minimum viable product and your game should feel complete just with the core one very good strategy to guarantee that the core Loop is the focus of your production is called concentric development and that means building the inner Circles of your game first focusing on the core polishing the core before building the outer circles the secondary systems of your game concentric development can help you guarantee that the core Loop is your first priority and that you have a solid experience with the most important parts of your game that doesn't mean that you build your game in a linear way level after level but it does mean that you are not creating the crafting system before polishing the combat if the crafting system is not part of the core all right reason number two you don't understand the priorities of your game and what you should build first there is something called the build order that is super important in game development but we barely talk about it which is crazy you can have the same team the same deadline but the order in which you decide to build your levels and characters and narrative might completely change the outcome that you get at the end and whether or not you actually complete the game one classic example is the tutorial and the first level of your game you should not be building those early on the tutorial and the first level are extremely important to guide your players on how the game works and those should be very polished but if you start building those things early on you actually don't know how your game works yet so you need to rework all those parts of your game over and over wasting time and effort that is why you should generally start by building the middle parts of your game first before the rest and that is just one single example should you be creating all of the enemies for your game back to back or work on the visual facts for the spouse you need to have those and many other questions with your team that entirely depends on the type of game that you're making and the core gameplay Loop but one good principle is early validation you need to build assets for your game and know if they actually work the way you intended so let's say that your game has many different types of enemies one is melee one is ranged another one doesn't attack but grabs your character in place you need to build one of each type first and test them on gaml to see if they work in isolation and together you need to validate them so plan your build order with early validation in mind for mechanics and events and you have a much stronger production already let's go to reason number three you don't know how to budget and schedule your game having a detail guide on how to do those things is outside the scope of this video but let me know in the comments if you want that and I can have a video just about budgeting however the important part is don't go blind on your production of course there's no such thing as a perfect schedule and accurate production but it is important for us to at least always have some numbers in mind some notion in mind of how much your game will cost how much is left and what your team can accommodate so many Indy teams just leave this a chance they might do a budget one time and never look at it again until money is running out that's why they go out of business so do your due diligence have a simple and effective schedule in your hands with a good buffer in it so your team has confidence that you know what you're doing once again don't leave this a chance which brings us to reason number four you don't foresee risks that might bite you in the ass later this technique is called the risk register and it's so simple you just skip a list of things that can go wrong in several aspects of your game and keep track of them new technologies might compromise your pipeline there are hidden costs you didn't know about or maybe the requirements to publish your game on consoles the infrastructure to have a good beta test in place for players so many things can jeopardize especially the late stages of your production don't go blind on this write everything down and have a plan in mind on how to mitigate those things all right last one but one of my favorites reason number five you don't play test your game enough oh boy am I tired of seeing people that simply don't schedule enough play tasks with real players throughout development they schedule like one or two play tests and they think that's enough it is not nearly enough and this is a deal breaker for me you need to test your game with real players as early as possible and as often as possible usually that'll be after the vertical slice that is the refined prototype of a game in which the core mechanics are in place set up the environment for play test and schedule it several times throughout your production from pre-alpha to Alpha and beta so you can validate your mechanics with real players for gameplay narrative interface and much more so do segmented play tasks as well as general ones you need to understand if your boss fights are engaging if your tutorials working if your interface is intuitive for the player so you need to understand all of those things in isolation and how they work together and then you have to collect this data and feedback and know how to transform that into actionable items that is an integral part of your development once again if you're not play testing your game enough you're leaving too much on the table and many IND the teams have to realize that the things that can jeopardize the production the most are not coding assets or narrative they are things outside of that core scope many of those boring things like budget marketing and schedule those are actually the things that will allow your team to have a successful launch and allow them to keep working with many different games for several years I mean that's my goal I want to find a way to continue making the best games possible learn from them and do that again I don't want to run out of money I don't want to keep making the same production mistakes everybody's making and that is why all of those things are so important to us well I hope you found those things useful and believe me those are real things I have been making game for 10 years and I see team after team not paying enough attention to those things and simply getting in trouble later in production games are complex we need to find better ways to complete and release our projects otherwise it's just a hobby not a professional career well that's it guys thank you very much for watching don't forget to subscribe to the channel and let me know if you have other topics that you would like me to cover here on the Channel all right take care

Channel: Harry Florencio - Game Production

Views: 135

Keywords: game development, game production, gamedev, game dev, how to finish a game, concentric development, risk register, how to playtest

Id: p_LB6MB9fDc

Length: 9min 51sec (591 seconds)

Published: Fri Dec 01 2023