At this point, it is almost two and a half years since we’ve started working on video games. That also means almost two and a half years of game designing, artwork, programming for video games and others.
In this Tale Tuesday I will focus on the game design part of development and gained experience impact on the further games and future ideas. We’ll also talk about how it influences the game ideas overtime.
‘Market Dominion’ was quite brave idea for the first project, but that’s what both developers agreed on as the first game. We definitely had some interesting ideas for the game, however not all could’ve been achieved in our state with the lack of experience we then had. Still, with a little cut design, we’ve made it with similar mechanics and ensured it all worked together. The designing phase – at least in general – was pretty much done. Now the details were important.
As we’ve learned, but didn’t notice at the time, we’ve spent a bit too much time on some things trying to overdetail them with minor elements that – in the long run – would not really influence the game itself. We didn’t notice such issues because we weren’t aware of them. It’s all about learning from your mistakes.
The other thing we definitely put a bit too much detail into was the design document. It went into great details about all the components instead of sorting them in some meaningful manner. We ended up with a very long document instead of a compact one that would show the basics of existing concepts. We did realize the mistake a bit into the development, however there was no point in remaking that now. For further developments, we took that mistake into account – grately reducing the size of such file.
Some of the flaws of the design were that we weren’t really predicting the future. We did what we were supposed to do and designed things in such manner that what we wanted to work – did work. However, when it came to making a big, extensive changes, this is where our system failed. The things were designed and developed in such way, that further growth of the game through massive updates and DLCs became pretty much impossible to do. That made us pretty limited on further development of the game. We did not make that mistake again – now we’re making sure, that as many things as possible can be saved in a resource-like format, to be able to easily modify the contents of the game and possibly update them if there’s a need.
Overtime we’ve learned a lot about designing games properly and with simple yet interesting concepts. We’ve learned better and more organized methods, optimizing our ideas and properly using mechanics of engines to our advantage. All of those things combined definitely improved on the game designing and will definitely bring a difference in the future.
To be continued..
Iguana Mercenary 