Double the development, remove the prototyping.

The visual logic of Bientôt l’été is starting to be messy. Several system have been redesigned multiple times and fragments of old logic are still present here and there, in case I change my mind. Systems are also entangled with each other more than they probably should be in an attempt to control what should be running at which time.

All of this is a result of designing the game while programming it. And I should probably remake the whole thing. But there’s no time.

In the future, I’ll schedule two production phases: one in which I figure out the design and that ends with alpha-testing and tweaking. And a second one in which the entire game is built again from scratch, according to the specifications defined in the previous phase. I imagine this second phase could be quite fast. It’s generally easy to program something if you know what the end result should be.

Prototyping is not sufficient as a first phase for the types of videogames that we want to make. Because our games are not just about interactions but rely on all facets of the software (visuals, sounds, processes, interactions, etc) for full impact. And it is especially important for testing the game on potential players that this impact can be achieved. I imagine for other games, testing if the players are having fun is sufficient. And I imagine this can be done through interaction testing alone. But we have other expectations.

Prototyping is also horrible if you are hoping to achieve a relatively specific mood. Playing around with placeholder graphics opens up a whole range of possibilities, most of which are simply not suitable or not feasible in the project at hand. This leads to frustration. Also, focusing purely on interaction tends to happen in a sort of cultural vacuum. You start creating things that feel nice, that have a certain basic emotional effect, that appeal to our animal instincts. But, apart from the fact that I find this very difficult to do, technically and design-wise, this is just not where I see our work. I’d much rather have broken mechanics in a virtual world that resonates with the player’s life experiences, than build an absurd world around some mechanics that happen to feel nice.