However, it did mean that by the time I had the money to hire artists to finish the pro-
ject, all of the game’s design was done and fully playable, and as a result the artists
created almost no art for the game that went unused. Using the placeholder art had not
hindered the game’s development in the slightest. I concentrated first on getting all of
the gameplay working, and then was able to focus on the visuals. Since I was not con-
strained by the thought of losing already created art assets if I changed the design, I was
able to take the design in whatever direction seemed most appropriate while I was
working on it.
OnCentipede 3D, a significant amount of work was done before the gameplay was
actually fun, and almost all of that work had to be thrown out as a result. The original
idea for the gameplay had little to do with how the originalCentipedefunctioned from a
gameplay standpoint, and featured a more meandering, less-directed style of play.
Using this original gameplay conception, six levels were actually built and numerous
other levels were planned out on paper. For various reasons, the gameplay simply was
not much fun, and we began to look at what could be done to fix that problem. In the end,
we made the enemy AI function more like the original game’s enemies and adjusted the
gameplay accordingly. When we tried it we were not sure if it would work, but that
gameplay style turned out to work quite well. Unfortunately, much of the level design
work that had been done was lost. All of the levels that had been designed on paper
were thrown away because they were incompatible with this new style of gameplay. Of
the six levels that had been actually built, three had to be discarded in order to support
the new gameplay, while the others had to be changed significantly in order to play well.
Looking back, if we had focused on making the gameplay fun before making a large
number of levels, we could have avoided a lot of extra work and wasted effort. With the
gameplay functional, we were able to draw up documents describing how the rest of the
game would function. For the most part, we were able to hold to those documents
throughout the remainder of the development process, with only minor changes neces-
sary. Of course it would have been catastrophic to the project if we had been unable or
unwilling to throw away the work we had already done. If we had tried to keep all of the
levels without changing them significantly, the game would have shown it and those
levels would have been greatly inferior to the ones made with the proper gameplay in
mind. If we had been foolish enough to stick to the initial design completely, the entire
game would have suffered and the end product would not have been as fun as it turned
out to be.
Keep It Simple..............................
Early in development, it makes sense to work with only your focus instead of a long
design document. The focus is short enough that it can easily be completely rewritten if
your game changes direction. Yet, at the same time, the focus will give you a clear direc-
tion for what you are trying to achieve with the gameplay you are endeavoring to
implement. In the prototyping stage, the focus may change many, many times as you
shift the game’s goals to match what you find to be working out in terms of gameplay.
When your prototyping is done, you will have a solid focus that you can reasonably hope
to follow for the rest of the game’s development.
Unfortunately, you may not always have the option of keeping the game design pro-
cess organic. If you are working for an established company, you may have a fully staffed
Chapter 15: Getting the Gameplay Working 285