Developing a New Major

I’m going to go thru my notes a couple of times – first to pull out links and names that I want to follow up on, then skills that I need to work into the curriculum, then general notes (that’s my plan anyway) . These notes are just for the production workshop. There is another post about the meal time speakers which were very good too.

Links and People and readings to check out

Heather’s company – Media Sunshine, Inc.

Rapid Development by Steve McConnell (powerpoint handout we got has a lot of books, articles, websites – gotta go thru those too)

Skills to work into class

brinstorming – be prepared for the discussion, not free for all but managed discussion, can brainstorm on lots of parts of the preproduction decisions like initial idea, character names, the game look & feel, end gameplay techniques. Goal is to get lots of ideas, bring in ideas from lots of different players. Have a specific topic to discuss, not too broad as in just sayinhg let’s talk about game. Broad discussion of a specific topic is good for generating genre mashups. Don’t get sidetracked with little detail discussions. Have someone lead the discussion who’s not a part who can enforce the rules of no criticism, no discussion of idea details who can bring up related scenarios to stimulate discussion. Have specific start and stop times – if more discussion needed, schedule a 2nd session with a specific focus. People have to prepare ahead of time – here’s the opc and come to the meeting with 10 ideas to start with. After session, leads prioritize ideas and give people tasks based onthe ideas maybe to research ideas before next meeting where you whittle the list from top 10 to top 3

defining concept – always hard to lock down because of new ideas popping up, changing tech. Put it in a mission statement – here’s what we are making and who we are making it for. Make sure everyone has the statement and keeps it in mind during production. It’s the vision of hte game. Doesn’t have to be fancy or business speak. Having the statement firmly stated keeps developers from being distracted by cool features that don’t really fit that mission statement. Then have relevant leads write up game setting (character, location…), mechanics (game play, how camera works, controls), story synopsis (setting, key events, how player introduced, what happens on each level, how does it end), concept art (cell shaded, 2d vs 3d, what characters look like), audio (good to include right from the beginning – sound effects, voice over ) – I think these should be the categories for our game design doc – write circularly – have a starting point for each, update as development progresses but always referring back to initial core idea

competitive analysis – my favorite part of preproduction – look at past games (especially past games that have set some kind of standard for the genre), current games, announced games that will be released soon -  Don’t want to reinvent the wheel if there are UI or genre standards that users expect. She keeps in a spreadsheet – title, developer (know their reputation), publisher (know their reputations also, especially if you’re indy looking for a publisher), platform, estimated release date, game summary, key features (especially those that seem likely they will play up in their advertising – and features that you will have to include to at least measure up to them), review scores (like on metacritic.com – these are really important – some contracts put in a metacritic score that htey want your game to reach or ya don’t get money), sales figures if ya can get them

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SWOT – strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, threats – heps you be prepared to deal with possible problems and how to take advantage of good things. strengths and weaknesses are usually things that you have some control over within your team, some strengths you can exploit in advertising or development to make game even better; some weaknesses like inexperienced team or a bad platform choice for your game or tight timelines can’t always be mitigated and instead just ahve to be endured. Opportunities and threats are things you don’t have any control over like market trends  but you have to think about how you can take advantage of them if they occur or what you might do to lessen their impact if they’re bad. It’s a high level analysis designed to get people thinking about the good and bad of hte game. Not enough just to say here’s our strength – have to think about how you take advantage of it, plan specific actions – save tme later especially if a problem pops up and everybody is running around stressed

risk analysis – ongoing process of thinking about what can go wrong and figure out what to do about it – how to react to eh threats and project weakness and what actions you can take – good to show to upper management. kind of what if analysis – what if the publisher cuts 3 months off hte project, what if hte lead developer quits. Figure out how likely event will happen and what impact it will have on the project and what you can do. If something has a high probability of occuring and will have big negative impact on project then deal iwth it first. Helps you prioritize how to deal with the myriad fires that you know are going to pop up.

prototyping (paper and digital) – lets people outside the team see the idea, makes it tangible. Part of iterative design – want to have a playable version very early in the preproduction and refine the prototype as idea developed and you get ready to move into production phase, especially want to prototype if you are including a new mechanism or something really complicated, when you look at hte prototype ask is it fun to play and do the mechanics work. Don’t just throw features into your game on a whim – test them all. Prototypes can start discussion about the game among all the different groups because htey can see and interact with the idea

General notes

preproduction – we spent a whole day here – big picture seems to be do as much planning and discussion and get buy in from as many people as possible to forestall expensive changes later. A core team of leads can start a project and start the preproduction. Goal is to see if concept(s) can be turned into viable game – not just game that yYOU want to play, but game that a wide audience would play), decide if you’re developing for a specific niche big enough to make profit or mass audience. Decide specifically what game concept is so you know what you’re making and it’s requriements so you can set up budget and schedule. Interesting average – 10-25% of project’s total time should be spent on preproduction including creating playable prototypes. Preproduction is time to negotiate with publisher for extra time, story changes – want to have all the decisions set and have everyone sign off on them by end of preproduction. Seems like a big topic = get buy in from people up and down the food chain, maintain open lines of communication, keep on top of things to keep problems from getting out of control. Lots of doc churned out – concept doc, competitive analysis, SWOT – more thinking ya do now, the better prepared you are in the future to handle problems and changes. I think that’s what we have to get across – create schedule, stick to the schedule. I will be producer on the freshman and sophomore projects – i will give them a gantt chart with key dates and key dependencies. Each group can modify and add additional tasks and assign resources – but no taking out my tasks

leads are the producer’s subject matter experts who are also good at management stuff. leads don’t get to do much content creation – just not time so you might not want to make your best animator the animation lead (they might be really good at drawing but not at schedule management)

you have to pitch your idea to management/the publisher (even if you’re publisher-owned stuiod) – have all the analysis done, have the playable (but disposable) prototype, have your game idea nailed down solid before you go. publisher is going to have changes they want even if they like your idea which is why you don’t want to be too committed time/money wise to the prototype. Might be a series of meetings – pitch idea, get feedback, you go away and do research and then come back with new proposal, get feedback, rinse and repeat. You don’t have to implement all their ideas – be ready to say why not, how they would affect the schedule or point out what you know from the competitive analysis that goes against hteir feedback. Don’t be combative – everyone wants to make good game

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class ideas, conference notes, future play, game producer, heather chandler