for which you were striving. Many of the ideas you or members of your team have may
be fine concepts, but if they do not fit the game you are currently working on, they are
not worth exploring or implementing. Do not throw these incompatible ideas away,
however. Write them down in your notebook for the next time you are working on a
game design. If they are good ideas, there is probably some game with which they will
work well. If they are very good ideas, you may even want to design an entire game
around them. But for the current project, by referring back to your focus you should be
able to determine whether these extra, cool features are helping or hurting your game
as a whole.
Once the design document is finished and other elements of preproduction are
completed, full production can start on your game. Your team of programmers, artists,
and other personnel will begin attempting to implement what you have set out to
accomplish in your design document. As the project proceeds, there will be countless
times where questions arise. Your design document will not cover everything needed
to actually make the game playable; it cannot possibly. Questions will come up about
how to implement a feature, in addition to new ideas about how to improve the game.
For each of these, again, you should refer back to your focus to clarify your team’s direc-
tion. Is the implementation that is being suggested going to keep the game on track
with the focus or will it distract from the main thrust of the game? Is the distraction
going to be too much of a diversion? Using your focus statement wisely throughout the
course of the project will keep the game on the right course, and will result in an end
product that is better because of it. Players will know the difference between a game
that is properly focused and one that is not, even if they do not communicate their feel-
ings in so many words. They will play and enjoy a focused game and will quickly cast
aside one that is unfocused.
Changing Focus..............................
Of course, either while working on your design document or when the game is in full
production, it may become apparent that the goals of your game need to change. This
can happen for a variety of reasons. You may come to see shortcomings or failings in
your original focus. Through the act of creating your game, you may come to recognize
a more compelling experience that the game can provide that is outside the scope of
your original focus. Depending on where you are in the project’s development, you may
want to change your focus. This is particularly painless to do when you are still in the
preproduction phase and the design document is not yet complete. In fact, you should
expect your focus to change several times, if not on a daily basis, while you are working
on the design document. There is nothing like trying to write down all the important
information about your game to expose holes and failings in your original concept.
Even beyond the design document, when you are working on your game’s first
level you may begin to see weaknesses in your design, holes you had not anticipated
when you were just working with an idea of the gameplay in your head instead of a play-
able game on the screen in front of you. At this point making changes to the focus is still
not catastrophically damaging to your schedule and will not involve redoing much work.
Better to fix problems in the game and your focus now than to be stuck with them for
the rest of the project and end up with an inferior game.
Chapter 5: Focus 79