Within Rules of Play, the authors advocate something so phenomenal, I am compelled to quote it:
"We have a straightforward rule of thumb regarding prototyping and playtesting games: a game prototype should be created and playtested, at the absolute latest, 20 percent of the way into a project schedule."
My heart grew three sizes when I read those words. Look at the rule another way: At least 80% of a game's development cycle should be testing, redoing, and polishing. at least.
Imagine what awesome games could be made if design teams were expected to take 80% or more of their development time refining and perfecting their prototypes.
There exists at least one such game - Puzzle Quest. Infinite Interactive had a playable prototype for Puzzle Quest up and running after only 2 months. Then they spent an additional 25 months tinkering with, adding content to, and polishing the game. Having a working prototype just 7.4% of the way into their project schedule allowed them to develop a fun, successful game.*
While I couldn't find precise numbers for World of Warcraft, we can infer that a large part of Blizzard's development cycle is spent on iterative design, given the high level of value they place on game polish.**
In my experience, games like these are the exception.
I'll be keeping my eye out for other examples of games that followed the <20/>80 rule of thumb during development. It would be an interesting chart to look at game success vs. how much time dev teams spent in the prototyping and iterative design phases.
References:
* The September 2007 issue of Game Developer has a comprehensive story on the development of Puzzle Quest.
** Rob Pardo's keynote speech for AGDC 2006 gives some hints on the amount of time Blizzard spends polishing.
I encourage all game designers to read Rules of Play, a game design textbook by Katie Salen and Eric Zimmerman.
1 comment:
Look at the rule another way: At least 80% of a game's development cycle should be testing, redoing, and polishing. at least.
Well, sort of... not really.
You don't polish a prototype.
The benefits of early prototyping are legion, but spending 80% of the development time iterating on a "completed game" isn't really one of them.
A prototype might even be discarded in its entirety. You could do a 2d prototype in Flash for a 3d game written in C++, for example.
But prototypes can be super valuable, even in situations like that.
They can also be a waste of time: You wouldn't prototype a sequel in which the gameplay isn't changing.
(No need to warn against prototyping too much, though - we seem pretty safe)
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