Prototype your game and save time!

On a recent visit to a gaming event I had the chance to play various prototypes from both young and veteran game devs. Without giving any names I want to talk about one of the games I played at this event and sort of talk about a mistake I made often during my early years in the games industry.

This game was a 2D sidescrolling platformer where you control the player by a gamepad and you could jump on things, hit some things and adventure to various areas and so forth. Nothing out of ordinary or new in terms of features however the graphics were out of this world. When I saw this game my Jaw almost hit the floor. They wrote shader after shader and created elaborate sprites for each enemy and creature and attack. The main character had a special tool that animated its garments specifically for each frame of its jumps. Every time there was a message on your screen it was some AAA budget UI madness that hypnotized you into loving it. Every bit of the game looked like someone put their life's work on it. It looked like they sunk years into making this game and verified it after talking to one of the developers.

Painting a stark contrast the story of this game is something like the following: A young hero who has no money wakes up in her room and promptly goes out to fight some monsters that attack the city for unknown reasons. There was nothing else to the story. I was thrown into this amazing world with amazing visuals with amazing shaders with amazing UI effects and with amazing explosions and power attacks the player can do but when I asked the developer who the character was I received a reply along the lines of 'Yeah... We don't really know. We don't have a name for her. She's just the main character.'

This is a common mistake to make when you don't have anything to tell or you don't have a story to recount but you love games and you want to make a game just like the ones you loved playing. Unfortunately I'm also guilty of making this mistake many times. Most often young devs end up making games in the same spirit Michael Bay makes movies. It's all about the explosions and the action and there is not much else to withdraw from the experience. Obviously there are games that mechanically dominate and entertain and lack on the side of story however this doesn't mean a game that doesn't have a story isn't telling one but more on that at a later time.

The problem I see here is twofolds: One is that they didn't have a vision for the game apart from it looking and playing great and two is that they sunk an immense amount of dev time to polish the game before they decided what the game is about and if they want to make changes to anything at this point it's going to be a pain in the ass. You want to change the main character's clothes... all those weeks you spent on making those tight spritesheets need to be repeated, you want to bring a story element that ties your gameplay together then you have to match the quality of all the visuals you created, coded and timed to include that bit. What about the player UI? That super cool shader effect you wrote needs to be rewritten and readjusted because you need to add a new bar there... you get the idea. It's close to impossible to bring game altering decisions at this point without it costing an arm and a leg in production.

Mockups are super helpful. Use them to save time. Left and right will play the same game.
It takes weeks to make the art and animatio for right and a few minutes for the left.

Wise thing to do is to prototype and mockup your game and make sure you plug as many holes as possible before you commit to polishing it. On paper you can put a mark down and it could be a new enemy whereas on a polished game that's not the case.