Comments on: How Does a Good Game Start?

By: Daniel Cook

Daniel Cook — Fri, 19 Apr 2013 17:46:33 +0000

It really varies a lot. I personally tend not to have a lot of ‘instant fun’ games.

There’s also a lot of definitions of ‘fun’.
1. Fun that is visible to the designer
2. Fun that is visible to an educated consumer of prototypes (Someone who can see past balance issues and art.)
3. Fun that is visible to an educated gamer with slight handholding through the learning phase.
4. Fun that is visible to a non-gamer with no handholding.

The dates also vary a lot due to the project. Like we are working on one project that is easily going on 6 months now. Initially folks were part time and it is in a genre that I have almost zero experience making. Yet despite not being even stage 3 fun, I still have faith it will turn into a delightful game.

Yet, just to keep costs down, we are constantly trying to push prototypes towards fun faster. A hard problem. :-)

take care,
Danc.

By: Jeff Alexander

Jeff Alexander — Thu, 18 Apr 2013 07:41:16 +0000

At GDC this year, three Spry Fox folks (including Daniel Cook) said that they iterate prototypes quickly to find the fun behind a game idea, and that it generally takes two weeks to two months. Longer than that and they currently feel it’s best to stop pursuing it.

By: Nahil

Nahil — Wed, 17 Apr 2013 23:30:00 +0000

I think what’s really important is the type of game you’re making. Many games begin in development with some sort of core toy, and if this toy is fun, the developer moves on to craft a game around this toy. Other games (usually of a more strategic nature) Don’t have this core toy at the beginning because the idea depends on a lot of interacting parts interacting on the whole to realize it’s “fun potential”. So it makes sense that FTL and Dan Cook’s games aren’t immediately fun because they have this strategic edge with no real core toy to play with. They need the whole set of interactions to even function, but once they do, they’re usually great fun and very deep experiences.

By: Wesley Mackinder

Wesley Mackinder — Wed, 17 Apr 2013 22:38:55 +0000

I’ve had a game idea in my head for years now. I don’t know if it’d be any fun. At this point I should just completely ignore it and just look at new ideas when I have the time to prototype something.