Dev Log 7: Pre-Production Principles

Introduction

Today I'm discussing the principles of pre-production that have helped my team get through early stages of development with desirable results. We started off with a vague concept of a resource management competitive board game. Now we're at a touched up product that is nearing actual production. The goal of this little journal entry is to explain what we did, what worked, what didn't work, and how we got here. Hopefully someone will have a nice takeaway from this entry and will be able to learn from it (someone like my future self).

Where we started

Our initial idea for our board game stemmed from research our lead designer did into cyber security and the threats it presented to any kind of game studio. We've seen throughout the years that companies and their consumers have been victims of poor security and malicious attacks. With his research and initial concept for game mechanics, we were able to begin pre-production.

• Documentation
  • It goes without saying that one should always write down their ideas, thoughts, changes, process, and everything else that comes with making something.
  • It might seem like a waste of time, but having any of those down on paper helps you really take a critical look at it, analyze it through different lenses (Jesse Schell's usually).
  • Use this to present and showcase the details to other people. They themselves act as a lens to scrutinize your work with.
• The Big Picture, made up of thousands of smaller pictures
  • The work of actually putting together the design.  Having a concept paints the big picture, but now you need to fill it out and flesh it out. Using the benefits of documentation, these implementations to the design should be smooth. The hardest part should be being creative and understanding the problem you're trying to solve.
  • Your thousands of smaller pictures are the same as your big picture, but the smaller scale makes tackling and defining them much easier.
• Limitation
  • Scope is a powerful razor that can cut any design down to size. It can be your greatest tool for refining a design, but also the biggest bomb ready to tear everything apart. Your scope should be considered for every step of your implementation. This will always include time as a constraint.
  • Risk factors help you, and your team, understand the issues of what you might be stepping into. Your risks are a way to flesh out your limitations, just like the big picture helps you flesh out the concept.

Conclusion

Thanks to all of my team's efforts and the extensive pre-production we've been going through, we moved into player testing. Our board game is seeing some balancing changes for the resource economy, a necessary improvement to enhance the enjoyment of the game. We're really stress testing the design at this point and it feels great to have such interesting feedback from our players. The pre-production has really carried us through to this point. We're coming to a close on the majority of our work and very soon we'll have a shippable product that's fun, informative, and doesn't confuse anyone with its presentation.