that may turn out to be incorrect once the gameplay is actually functional. If a designer
builds an elaborate game design on principles that turn out to be flawed, the entire
game design will probably need to be reworked or, more likely, thrown away. But if peo-
ple have devoted large amounts of time to creating these flawed assets, they are going
to be understandably reluctant to throw them away. If a designer gets too attached to
those ideas, even if they later prove to be unworkable, she may try to cling to them.
This is an understandable natural human tendency. After all, a lot of work went into
planning the game in advance via a long design document — how can it all just be
thrown away? Cannot the assets be reworked to be usable? If you are not bold enough
to throw away your inappropriate content, in the end you run the risk of producing a
game that is patched together after the fact instead of built from the start with a clear
sense of direction.
When I set about working on my first published game,Odyssey: The Legend of Nem-
esis, admittedly I had little idea of what I was doing. I had inherited a game engine and
some portion of the game’s mechanics from the previous developer. At the time, the
project was very meagerly funded, and as a result, the publisher only requested a mea-
ger amount of documentation about where the game was going. I drew up a six-page
document that briefly described all of the adventures players would go on. First of all,
since the document was not very detailed, with just one page per major island in the
game, that left me lots of room to maneuver. Second, by the time I had implemented the
first two islands, I had learned enough about how the game truly worked that I decided
to throw away the last three islands and design them over again. Since I had only writ-
ten brief outlines of the gameplay in the first place, I did not actually lose much work.
Another interesting aspect ofOdyssey’s creation was that I developed the game
entirely using placeholder art. Along with the game’s engine, I had inherited a fair
amount of art from another project, and kept using that as much as possible. Since the
project was underfunded, I did not have an artist to work with during most of the
game’s development, so this decision was made more out of necessity than foresight.
284 Chapter 15: Getting the Gameplay Working
Keeping the
development
documentation light and
using placeholder art
keptOdyssey’s
development extremely
organic.