Scionwest Blogging Automotive, Gaming and Development

Game Development: Game Design Phase – The Initial Game Idea

This is the 2nd blog post in my Game Development series.  I had meant to publish this over a week ago but ended up getting sick and not getting around to finishing it up.
This time around we’ll go over a few things that I have done while coming up with game ideas and creating some basic concepts that I will implement into my games.

Phasing your Game

When it comes to building a video game, there are three major phases.

1. Game Design phase
2. Development and content creation phase
3. Testing phase

I find that identifying the components of each item I am working on really helpful.  I use the phasing of a video game as an example.  You want to create a game right?  So you break it down to its core elements which I believe can fit into the three phases mentioned above.  It provides you with a good direction to start. So knowing that we must first design our game, we will not touch a single line of code.  The more code we touch, the less design that is done and we need to make sure that every aspect of the game has been designed.  If we skip or miss items, you’ll have to design on the fly while coding.  This can lead to additional changes needing to be made across your entire project.
Typically your programming will occur several months later, which will result in you being in a different state of mind.  When you start designing during the programming phase, a lot of times people will try to incorporate new ideas into the game.  Doing re-design during the development stage of your project is never a good idea!
If you have a playable version of the game and find that it’s not fun to play at all, then at that stage you would just return to your design phase and initiate a project wide re-design. It is however, usually a bad idea to introduce new concepts and ideas half-way through development.  When that occurs (in most cases), it indicates that you rushed through your design to fast and didn’t give yourself or the team enough time to flesh out the design of your project.
If you do have a epiphany during development of your project, make sure that it fits into your projects scope and that implementing this idea will require zero changes to the other components already developed.  That will help reduce the headache of adding new content when you really need to.

 Phase 1: Game Design

The first stage of any game development project is the design phase.  Again, we will break down the components needed in order to help provide us with a clear path to follow.  The following phasing is what I’ve found to work pretty well.  Of course each team is different and you’ll need to adjust the components as needed for your team and project. Since there are so many parts to designing the game, I try to break it down to a major design component that is then filled with sub-components.

1. Initial Game Idea
   • Create a baseline project schedule
   • Setup your Team meetings
   • Define the games genre
   • Decide on the business model.
   • Play video games
   • Decide what style and gameplay elements you want.
   • Decide on a story line theme for the game
2. World Design
   • Design your character.  This is what will be played by the users.  What is the players story?  What weapons, equipment and additional content will be available for it?
   • Map out the game world to use as a blueprint.  How to implement the games theme, styles, environment settings etc.
   • Design the worlds friendly characters.  Decide how the user will interact with NPC’s, friendly AI, mounts etc.  How will they act?  What is their relationship to the player and other NPCs?
   • Determine how you will fight the bad guys, and then design them!  What will they look like?  How often do you fight? Are they quick kills or difficult etc.
   • Design the games objectives.  You have the world designed, it’s interactions designed, it’s enemies designed.  So now figure out how you will implement the games objectives into the world you’ve created conceptually.  If things don’t quiet fit together, revisit previous stages in the design process to adjust and tweak.
3. Technical Design
   • Agree on Coding Practices
   • Pick what Operating Systems & Platforms you want to support.
   • Decide on the projects directory & content layout structure
   • Build a list of game components that will need to be created.
   • Research and decide which language and environment you want to use for programming.
   • Decide what classes you will need to write as Object Oriented.  Including laying out any parent/child class hierarchies and abstracted classes.
   • Acquire any 3rd party tools that you will need.
   • Decide what 3rd party tools need to be extended on or what custom software you will need to write.
4. Finalize the Design
   • Design the menu systems
   • Design the players HUD.
   • Place all of the design choices from all 4 phases into a master Game Design Document.
   • Refresh the project schedule as needed.
   • Flag the Design Phase as completed!

The components provided above have worked out pretty well for me in the past, and is pretty close to what I’m using with my current collaborative project.  These components will change based on your projects needs, but you can follow this flow-chart and add\remove what items that are pertinent to your game.
There is a lot of content to go over for each one of these components to the Design phase.  With this post, I will cover the first component completely and follow up with number 2 in the next post for this series.

Component 1: Initial Game Idea

This part of the Game Design phase is really the most difficult to complete, primarily due to the difficulty in deciding if the game is “ready for development” or not.  Some teams get stuck in a never ending loop, constantly updating the idea and spending months building the design.  They tend to argue during the design process and then go their separate ways due to differing ideas.  Don’t let your original concept go astray to far!  It’s important to stay focused on the original idea and help it bloom.
During this stage, you will need to come up with the genre of the game, the mechanics, gameplay, decide what makes it fun and create a list of items that you want the game to implement.  As you move through the 2nd, 3rd and 4th components of the Game Design phase, you will likely need to revisit the Initial Game Idea as things will typically change as you design the game world and come up with objectives for your game.
Revisiting any of the components within the Game Design phase is not a bad thing, and is usually recommended prior to finalizing your game design document.  It’s important that you have milked all that you can from your game idea prior to starting development.

Create a baseline project schedule

The importance of scheduling your project will depend on the needs for your game.  If the game has been financially backed, has several team members with time constraints or many other reasons that would require tracking the projects progress, you will need a schedule.
Schedules are a helpful way of ensuring you are meeting your objectives on-time and provides some encouragement as you complete milestones that are shown on the schedule. It is of course not a important factor if you are doing this on your own time at home after work hours, scheduling probably won’t be something you need to worry about.
Creating a baseline schedule will help give you a general idea of how much time it is going to take.  While working with a team, discuss how long each member feels it will take to complete each component of Phase 1, Phase 2 and Phase 3 of your game development.  This does not need to be super accurate, so no need to spend a ton of time on it up front. 
You can refine it during Component 4 "Finalize the Design” .  In most cases, I find that using a GANTT styled project scheduling system works really well.  It lets you create milestones and track the progress of your project on a daily basis.  As your schedule slips (or is completed ahead of schedule) you can adjust the current progress to reflect it. 
There are several pieces to a schedule.  The Milestone is a chunk of your project that you believe is really important to complete.  When you finish this chunk of the project, you would consider it a major milestone having been completed.  You’ve hurdled a large portion of the project and your schedule should reflect that.  I typically would base my milestones off of my Components (not sub-components).  There really isn’t any limit to the number of milestones you can have during the development of your game.  Some people prefer fewer milestones, but I believe that basing them off the components associated with each Phase of your project will provide a nice balance. 
It’s always nice to hit a milestone and going to long without achieving the completion of one can be disheartening for the project team.  Nothing screams “We’re doing really well!!” like completing a project milestone on-time. At the end of each week, it is recommended that you update the schedule to show what you have completed.  Using GANTT based software will let you do this easily.  As you progress with various items, you can adjust the percentage the item is completed.  If you are 25% completed with designing the weapons for your player, then mark that item as 25%.  If you completed a item earlier or later than scheduled, update it on your GANTT chart so that the entire team can see the progress you are making.
Once you have updated the schedule, I strongly recommend sharing the updated version weekly with the team during a team meeting.  Even if you share the schedule on a Dropbox or SkyDrive styled sharing system, not everyone will check if it’s updated. 

Setup your team meetings

The best way to ensure everyone is aware of where the project stands with scheduling, design decisions and overall progress, would be to show it at a meeting.  If you do it over the internet, then share it through your IM service or use Google+ Hangouts.  It’s important that everyone sees the progress so as to provide encouragement when they are ahead of schedule or provide encouragement to do better if they are falling behind.
Perhaps someone in the team can discuss a issue that is causing the schedule to slip or a team member might need some help with a item to ensure it is completed on time.

While you are in the design phase of the project, daily meetings are really encouraged.  Designing the game is something that can progress daily and meeting up to make sure everyone has their ideas out on the table and are in agreement with decisions is important.  Use some form of documentation to track the decisions that are made.  These decisions will ultimately end up in your finalized design document.

Define the games genre

It’s difficult to start designing your game if you don’t know what the genre of the game will be.  I typically will create a major genre with several sub-genres that tie the game together. 
I would like to refer to the modern online First Person Shooters of today.  Their primary genre would be FPS however, they have sub-genres such as RPG for experience and leveling up, RTS with troops, tanks and powered bases and usually squad based strategic tactics that have a command.  The game is still a FPS, but borrows heavily from other genres to complete the game.
When coming up with the genre you want to use, I recommend choosing a major genre that you want, and then attaching sub-genres to it.  Just make sure that the major genre makes since for your game.  If you are building a Call of Duty styled game, then RTS should not be your primary genre, it should be FPS.  If you are building a Final Fantasy styled game, then RPG should be your primary genre, not MMO/FPS.

Decide on a business model

This is really important to nail correctly at the early stages of the project.  Once you have decided, your game will be built around this model and changing it will be hard later down the road. 
If you choose to go Free-To-Play and have Micro-transactions, then you need to have cash transactions, currency and purchasable content that are coded heavily into the game.  If you are going to sell for $50 and have no in-game purchases, then you need to figure out how the players will unlock content and progress.

Play video games

This is a really fun stage to be in.  The goal is to play as many games that match your major genre and sub-genres as possible.  I would even recommend playing some that don’t fit into your genres at all, but see how things are done and work.  You might like the way objects interact in a game that doesn’t match you genre, but interactions can always be tweaked in your game to match the game you played more.
I personally create a bucket list of items I’m looking for, the following is an example:

• Camera movement
• Player movement
• Attack system
• Dialog delivery
• NPC Interaction
• Inventory system
• Weapon switch system
• Animations
• Level transitions
• Cut-Scenes
• Scripted Sequences

These are just a few of the things that I have in my bucket list.  The important thing here is that you do not create a bucket list of items you want but rather a list of components that are in every video game regardless of genre.  Then as you play the games you can grade the games implementation. 
If you play Gears of War and liked the Duck & Cover system, you would mark it as a 5-star implementation.  Then if you play Call of Duty and wish that it had that system, you would mark it’s movement as 3 star since it was missing covering. 
At the end of the day, you check what items you graded high and compare to what is graded low.  You’ll find the items that you liked the most and wish were implemented into other games.  Those are the items that you can look into ways of implementing into your game as well.  If you liked them, and missed having them in other games, then it’s a good idea to have it in your game.  After all, you’re building your game, so build something you want to play!

Decide what style and gameplay elements you want

Now that you have your genre decided, your bucket list of items created, it’s time to start the actual heavy design.  Here you decide how the gameplay will be, what the style of the game will be, how objects interact, how the game will progress and what major features the game will have.

Decide on a story line theme for the game

The last thing you will need to do for the Initial Game Idea component is come up with the games story and then decide on the games theme.  If the story is about a king who needs to be over thrown from his palace, then decide on the time period for the game.  Middle-age?  Then we need stone castles and lots of trees & mountains.  You’ll need NPCs dressed poorly in the villages and dressed fancy in the kingdoms.  This will then give you a general theme that you can use for the UI layouts and artwork for the game.

In conclusion

This initial stage can take a lot of time to get finished, but it’s a really important step.  Without getting all of these things ironed out up front, you’ll spend a lot of time rehashing things which will slow down your project. 
Keeping the team working together and getting your ideas out there together daily will help make sure that your project runs smoothly.  The goal is to have the entire concept inked in paper so you can start developing as a team without meeting constantly to ask “How do we need to do this feature?”.

Over the next couple of weeks I’ll work on the next post in this series which will cover the World Design component of the Game Design phase.

I’d also like to hear any comments or recommendations from you guys on how you do your phasing, in what order you do things and how you manage your schedules.  Share with us!