Hope you’re ok Tim.

Looks great Jim! Can’t wait!

This thread is what half our phone calls are like.

…target for all other enemies or weapon types. The push to “make a game” of things is pushing back on people making individual features that might be interesting in isolation, but don’t contribute to the gameplay loop.

…or made prototypes that were interesting in isolation but didn’t make sense within an actually game loop. The other thing that in my experience hasn’t worked well is “templating”: Basically saying let’s make one weapon, or one enemy type, and we’ll take that to final, and then that will be the…

I don’t think we fundamentally disagree. I’m definitely not suggesting taking uninformed shots in the dark, just as you’re not suggesting to design exclusively on paper for months on end. I guess my perspective comes from having worked on projects that either restricted early development to paper…

Also can’t stress enough: Make a game out of your prototypes. It’s one thing to use a feature in its own test level, just to nail the realization, but to really see if it’s fun, create a challenge out of it. Playtest a full scenario. Create a tournament to see who on your team is best at it.

Congrats!

Oh wow, bit of a nostalgia overload here: That Captain was the first miniature I ever painted.

I do. That’s awesome!

The Design of Everyday Things by Don Norman is great and super applicable.

That’s awesome! Congrats Liz!

The publisher is between a rock and a hard place. They don’t want to negatively impact the pre-prod project, but there are so many dominoes lined up with the shipping project that they can’t delay. They just have to deal with the problem in front of them.

Absolutely. Or a common one is you get important projects nearing shipping, and you need all hands on deck, so you have to pull people from your projects in pre-production to get the near-shipping project out the door. But then those pre-prod projects are now no longer establishing their direction.

You could maybe argue that they should take those people and spin-up something new, and sometimes they do, or sometimes it’s a mix. It’s just not an easy situation. Anything new is also going to be in pre-pro and not ready for 200 people.

Is the publisher at fault? Well no, they shouldn’t be rolling people on to a sequel that no-one wants, and they were trying to do the right thing saving people’s jobs. Sometimes this is just one of those things.

…But maybe those teams are still in early pre-production and aren’t ready to have 200 people dropped on them. Suddenly the burn rate of that team goes through the roof and the cost of those early months/years where you’re supposed to be taking your time to find the right idea, becomes astronomical.

…But then then the game comes out, doesn’t sell well, and the publisher decides not to go ahead with a sequel. The publisher doesn’t want to fire people, so they see what else they have in development, and shifts those people to other teams…

One thing that doesn’t get talked about much is the impact that cancelling projects has on other projects. For example, say a team just released a game that was expected to do well, and that team was expected to go directly on to working on a sequel…