MatthewDoyleArt.com Blog

I recently received an email from a young college graduate, asking for advice on acquiring a game development position. While there have been many books and web articles written on the subject, I thought I might present my readers with a small bulleted list of tips that were of great help to me when I was the person asking for advice. The year is 2000 A.D., I’m 27 years old, working at Comp USA, recently married (and still happily so), and living in a crappy apartment in Houston, Texas. I had dropped out of Art School, had no direction in my life beyond my marriage, and was living from paycheck to paycheck. One day, I was playing one of the games on display and thought to myself, ‘Wouldn’t it be cool to play a game where the goal was NOT to kill people? Maybe something where you play a priest? Oh, and what if that priest had lost his faith? And what if there were multiple gods he could choose to follow?’ Suddenly I had a premise for a game that sounded intriguing. I mentioned the idea to my friends and my wife, who all began to tell me I should make the game.

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One of the largest issues in game development is that of scope management, particularly in this day of MAG (multi-action genre) games such as Grand Theft Auto. Game designers have a tendency to think big; more and bigger levels, more features. There is nothing wrong with this, in fact thinking big is critical to the process of developing innovative gameplay and innovative gameplay is the key to being successful as a company. The real trick however is to know when you have crossed the limit of your time and budget. This comes with experience. Veteran designers develop a sixth sense for knowing when they are approaching the limits of feature implementation for their projects; however, even the most senior among us still need to step back from time to time and begin cutting to stay on schedule. A secondary effect of scope management arises when designers are not willing to cut features and instead of doing one or two things well, their game ends up doing several things poorly. There are a few simple guidelines you can follow that will help you keep your game design lean, while maintaining fun and interesting gameplay.

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