story line. The story line allows for multiple solutions and non-linearity
whenever possible, with the player able to effect real change among the
NPCs he encounters in the game.Maintaining Focus ..............................
Once you have a focus down on paper and can read it over and say with confidence,
“Yes, certainly, that’s what I’m going for,” it is time to share it with the other members
of your team. It is important that you get everyone on your team to “sign on” to your
focus. You want them to acknowledge that, yes, this is the direction the team is taking,
and to agree that they see a compelling game coming out of it in the end. If no one on
your team thinks your focus is very captivating, and despite your best efforts to cam-
paign for it no one can get excited about it, you can come to one of two conclusions.
First, perhaps your game idea is not all that good. Hard as this may be to admit, it could
be that your focus statement and possibly the game it describes are simply not original
or enticing. If the idea in your head is still exciting to you, maybe you did not capture the
correct focus properly on paper. You should go back and try to figure out what about the
game excites you but did not come across in your focus.
If you persist in thinking your game is compelling and that your focus properly
reflects why, it may be that people on your team are not excited by it because they were
not involved in creating it. When working in a team environment, it is important to
include people in early brainstorming sessions so that they can feel that they contrib-
uted to the birth of the idea. Even if not everyone’s ideas end up being used, if you
honestly listen to people and use not only your own ideas but the best ideas regardless
of their source, you will end up with a happier team that respects your leadership. In the
end, all projects can benefit from a strong central vision that is maintained by a single
person, but that does not mean you need to lock yourself into a room to be “brilliant” all
by yourself. It is often said that the best lead designers on large projects act primarily as
filters, taking in ideas from all sources and molding them to fit into a single, unified
vision. It may be that the focus you have come up with is quite strong and will produce a
great game, but selling people on it will be trickier if they feel like they were needlessly
excluded from its creation.
It may also be the case that the team assembled is simply the wrong one to develop
the game you have come up with. Not every team can develop every type of game. A
team that has been making sports games for years, likes working on sports games, and
knows how to make a sports game fun is probably not the best team to enlist to create
your nineteenth-century economics simulation. If you have the option of finding a new
team for your game, you probably should. If not, you may need to come up with an idea
that most of your team is going to find compelling. It is important that everyone on your
team sees the value in your focused idea. Because of the collaborative nature of mod-
ern, high-budget computer games, it is virtually impossible to create a good game if you
do not have the majority of your team excited to be working on it.
If you are working on a project largely by yourself with others contributing signifi-
cantly less to the game than you, you may not need to sell your focus at all. Indeed,
games created by lone wolf designer/programmer/artists can be among the most
focused of computer games. Since one person is creating the vast majority of the
Chapter 5: Focus 77