t’s very common for developers, especially small teams just starting out, to have many questions regarding the duration of a project, what steps to take, and especially how to know when a project is ready.
How do we know when a game is ready for release? When does it have no bugs? When does he seem to be having fun? And how do we know if he’s fun enough? And if at the end of the project we discover a design problem and the game needs to be redone, what do we do? These are questions I hear a lot and usually my answer to them is basically the same: iteration.
What is Iterative Design?
Iteration is a cyclical process that is based on stages of development, testing and improvement of a product, in this case, the games being developed. In short, rather than starting to test the game in its final stage of development, the iteration process consists of testing it continuously over several stages.
So it works like this: your team has the idea for the game and starts developing it. It is very common for you to develop the entire project, or at least a part of it, and only then test and eventually publish the game. The problem with this model is that if you run into any design issues, or come up with new ideas while testing the game, chances are you’ll have to redo a lot of the game and waste a lot of time – and money – on it.
Using the iteration process you will develop part of the project, it can be a small prototype without all the art, just the main idea of the game mechanics, or even an analog version with paper and cardboard cutouts and you can test it out! Did you test it and find any problem in the design, in the programming, did you feel that the game is not good or did you have new ideas? Make the necessary changes and test again. Did you feel the game is ok to continue? Let’s go to the next part of development! Define what else you want to implement in the game, develop for a while and test again.
How long does this process take?
This process should be repeated throughout development, until the game is ready for release.
By testing the game continuously, at various stages of development, we were able to implement new ideas and find issues before they became issues too big to be resolved. But there’s a catch here too: you’ll never think your game is 100% complete. There will always be an extra idea, an interesting mechanic, a bug, an art that needs to be polished, and the iteration process presents the danger of an eternal project that, instead of flowing, guaranteeing the highest possible quality of the game, will just rotate in circles along the same problem.
To escape this, all it takes is for the team to be engaged in a common goal: to launch the best possible game. It’s simple to limit the iteration project so that it’s still viable and efficient: you can set a deadline for delivering the project step in question, and once that deadline passes, the project moves forward regardless of the state. It is also possible to limit the number of iterations for each step, and once this limit number is reached, the project moves forward. Always keep in mind that the game will never be 100% what you expect it to be, and that’s just how things work.
Read all our Games Design Posts
For the process to work well it is also important not to test the game only within the team. Internal testing is important to understand if the project is going the way the team wants it, but testing with players outside the project helps you understand if the game is doing well with the players.
As developers, we know what our game is about and we’ve invested a lot of time in it, so our judgment can be clouded by our involvement. When people who don’t know or aren’t involved with the game try it out, you can understand if your game is reaching your players the way it should. But the playtest is a subject for another post.
Keeping this pattern of development, and testing cyclically, it is possible to increase the quality of games produced and even reduce production time, after all even if developing and testing seems to be laborious and more time-consuming, change cycles prevent major changes from needing to be done at the end of production.
Thus, with the necessary care, the iterative design process can be very positive for your projects, avoiding problems and optimizing production time, as well as improving the quality of your game design.
Image by Alexander Antropov from Pixabay
