Journey of Onions
Week 1
Start of the Journey
We are at the starting line of the game development journey. We expected some constraints from our executive producers (project advisors), so we can start brainstorming our game experience. However, since this is a pre-production of a yearlong game development, things are different from other projects.
We are like a small team in the studio that has to create a game for the company. We have external pressure, but do not have restriction; most of the restriction comes from the practical side not on the creative side. This is like a role-playing game for pre-production. We will often talk about definition of constraints and creating those constraints.
The goal is to make our pre-production journey.
Our plan
We are going to make many pitches every week. We will learn how to make small pitches and prototype with it. Coming up with a vision through various prototypes is the key of pitches. We are aiming for creating at least 40 prototypes to find a game at the end of the process.
Our advisors will point us to some videos and articles about methodology to prototyping. To learn this in a practical manner, we are going to sign up for the Global Game Jam as a team.
Coming up with a definition of pre-production is also important in this journey. There are not any industry consensus on pre-production. Therefore, it is critical for us to set up our deliverables by ourselves. This will make a shared vision among the team, which will naturally lead to a successful game at the end.
What did we do?
What we did to start our journey is to list out all the games we played. Based on our gaming experience, we might find a common ground among the team, which will make our game development process much easier. Each of us wrote down at least 10 games with descriptions: genre, platform, and “wow” moment of the game. Based on this, we categorized our gaming experience as following.
We thought about doing a team pitch all together, but both quantity and quality of pitch are affected if we try to make consensus among the team. So we concluded to make our individual pitches and show it to the team.