Game Production and Development Cycles:

How does this process relate to smaller, indie productions? The work you’re doing?

No matter what the scale of a game, following the production/development process is crucial to creating a good game. All game developers need to plan properly and playtest early on in order to catch bad decisions and bugs at the beginning of the process, rather than later on when they are affecting multiple elements of the game. Having a clear plan of what needs to be done, mapping out major decisions and creating deadlines for yourself is an important part of any developer’s process and will do nothing but help them in the long run, even if they don’t have a large team to communicate with.

What Makes”Good” Writing?

Discuss the difference between knowing a good game when you play it vs having the insight to describe WHY a game works:

Anyone who has played many games can go through a particular game and pick our parts that don’t work and tell you if the game is good based on what they liked or disliked about the experience. However, it is still very important to develop the skills necessary to know why certain choices are good or bad, rather than just going with a gut reaction, even if your gut reaction is correct. Not only does this knowledge allow you to communicate with people who may not be able to tell as easily what makes a game good or bad, but you will be able to make important decisions in the planning process rather than having to reiterate and tweak ideas later on down the production process when they don’t work quite right.

How can Anna Anthropy’s analysis of Mario Bro’s influence the game you’re working on now?

Because we are currently working on 2D games with limited screen movement, many of the design decisions Anthropy discusses can serve as inspiration for the creation of more game components. For example, having two states for a player, each with different abilities and being called in different situations, can add an interesting dynamic to a player’s gameplay and keep a game from getting too static with repetitive abilities and play patterns. Anthropy also brings up the simplification of ideas and how they can give players the ability to infer what is going to happen in the game. She uses the example of creating a simple pyramid shape within a game in order to get the player to think about pyramids and the possibility of treasure being located inside. Creating game components like this can also create more dynamic play and lets the reader think about their decisions and what might be coming more carefully.