Good enough is not good enough.
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4 comments:
PS. why the hell does the blockquote mess up all my following paragraphs? I only used the buttons provided by the editor, no manual editing. Grrrr...
Haha, the Paragraph about Killzone made me laugh! ^_^
Great article! I wonder why you put it in the Scrapbook, it would work well in Game Design Reviews.
The article opens up a problem: how to figure out what you should do? I mean, if you start with "build a better car", how do you know where to add limitations to evolve the problem statement? I guess, most of the time there will be some technical limits (budget, technology) but if you focus too much on that you end up building stuff just because it is easy. I guess you need some kind of "compass" to guide you in your sear ch for the perfect problem statement. A kind of "vision".
The whole topic is somewhat similar to the presentation about Advanced Prototyping by Chaim Gingold and Chris Hecker I like so much. You can't really prototype anything when you have no precise idea what you want to achieve.
Btw, I'll fix the blockquote thing as soon as I get my notebook. It seems like the template is fucked up.
Oh yeah and your article reminded me of a moment when I was working with Daniel Renkel on Excit. It was a game with a pretty well defined problem statement - it was a clone of an existing game after all.
When the first real prototype version was running, we had a telephone discussion about the "feel" of the game. Up until then, we thought that the player would look at a level, figure out the solution and then move the avatar. We called that something like "Think, Think, Move, Win". However, the movement of the avatar turned out to be so much fun that we have decided to make it a more prominent part of the game by encouraging a different player behavior. One, where the player would figure the solution of a level while moving through it. We called it "Move, Move, Think, Move, Win".
I thought it was quite amazing how much room for design there was even though the problem statement seemed so rock-solid at first. I also did enjoy the way we approched the "feel" of the game.
Thanks for the feedback.
I'm definitely (btw I HATE how people write "definately") a think-as-I-go-type of guy. Maybe spoiled by Zelda where the puzzles mostly just flow. One reason I don't like playing chess. Or RTS. Too much planning involved.
Regarding Scrapbook vs. Reviews. Well it started as a quick thought and more of a personal reflection, during and after writing I just didn't think about re-categorizing it. It's kinda borderline in this case I think. How about merging both blogs (if technically possible at all) to avoid this kind of confusion (and an extra decision before posting)?
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