Hi! Here i am, i can finally proceed with the making of The Rogue of Nexus. (part 2)
Very well, so i shown the mock up to my boss and he liked it, reccomendations aside.
Time to start with developement, right? Nope.
That could be a thing on solo developement and/or making a game as hobby, but i'm not alone, and allies aside, there's a budget to validate and approve, which is provided from above, and the guys above need to know how that money will be spent (more precisely which tasks will be performed, which assets will be created and how much they cost) and more importantly how time will be spent, in order to meet deadline.
This "wonderful" phase is called Pre-Production and, while success cannot be determined just by that, a poormade pre-production will grant a hullova of problems and probably the failure of a paid project as well.
One of the previous projects i joined, a year after it's developement start, i think it suffered heavily this issue: the producer changed 1-2 times and the GDD changed a couple of times as well, i had to rewrite it on my own... the biggest issue is that the production and developement never communicated clearly on the goal to achieve and milestones to follow, so i basically tried to make a huge GDD, when problems started to come, the game had to be launched quite suddenly and in the mean time it was impossible to meet the expectation of the GDD, since the scope of the game shrank drammatically. The product has been launched with severe flaws and some of them still lurk in the shadow...
Please plan pre-production if you can.
The name of the phase strongly implies that a producer should deal with that, i'm a producer? No.
The producer of the italian team Studio Evil once taught at us (it was a game design course) that a Game Designer should never be a Producer at the same time (and vice-versa), i can agree with that: basically a Game Designer would want to build an incredible universe in its game; the Producer is there to remember that the team has X budget and Y time, so probably that universe is bound to become a bit/much less incredible that Game Designer's best scenario. Basically they are like the Hero and the Villain... there's a clear conflict of interest here.
However i personally think that it's quite important for a game designer to learn that stuff, even in case it will never happen to do that... both for gaining a bit of common sense and also because a game designer needs to know the gist of all developement processes, even to interact better with the whole team.
Well actually it's not like i was going to go through the whole process here, some week later a producer would join the project and provide a lot of help, in any case if you're the author of the game, then only you is aware of what the game is supposed to contain and (hopefully) the implications, namely the concrete effort and the list of assets to assemble the whole thing, so you must be aware of what they will cost, in all means.
My boss shared some info in how to do that, so i practiced a bit.
Here's a quick list of stuff i use in the meantime:
- Google Drive for store the documents of the project, which are destined to become a lot;
- Google docs (mostly for the equivalent of Word and Excel);
- Notepad, can't be more simple than that for writing quickly some text, planning stuff and listing ideas;
- Paint, i don't think a game designer necessarily needs more than that for a mockup or slap references quickly, keep it simple at this stage of developement.
What i need here is the Excel-like sheet, you need to line up assets, number costs and time cost, and other stuff.
This is what i came up with as first attempt:
Well, i mashed up the 3 sheets of the doc to fit in one image, but basically it features:
1 - The costs of the core, namely the essential part of the game, that cannot be cut in subsets of the whole part, like core gimmicks, the main character, darkness etc;
2 - The costs for each area, stuff that increase of number as the number of areas of the game increase, like x objects or y enemies... they are supposed to amount to the same value, so if making an area costs Z, then making 10 areas should cost Z * 10;
3 - Overall costs recap, this sums up the whole cost and can esily show how the costs scales according to the cuts or extra contents to the previous sheets, make sure to let the sheets use the formula to sum, multiply and all that jazz, and more importatly to make them talk with the third sheet.
This document must be quite readable, each line is supposed to describe what are you talking about, so the subject (an asset, a gimmick, a whole block of tasks), a brief description, the quantity, the cost and the total.
You show this to the publisher, maybe you'll do it much more professional than this, but that's the juice, and at the end of the story what they actually care is the last sheet, which in other words tells if costs vs budget are ok.
If you checked the content of the sheet, you might have realized that here we're talking just of costs in terms of time, after all it's useless to detail on money if you can't even balance the costs in term of time.
My budget in terms of time, technically speaking ammounted to 6 months, raw math says that even assuming you work like a machine, that equals to 180 days.
If you remember what i said in the previous part of this flashback, then you know i talked about making 10 areas... according to that sheet that's plain impossible, the numbers talks clearly: Even if text and numbers don't match, technically that was the cost of 4 areas and it did amount to more or less 515 days.
The core alone was too big already... it's time to make cuts to contents, lower the amount of areas and also receive a hand: (not The Hand!) i cannot do everything alone, starting from pixel art, but such truth was known already and i already talked about that with my boss: the developement team of The Rogue of Nexus is about to recruit members.
That was more or less the first week of pre-production, but obviously it doesn't end here... but we'll stop here for now. The next part will tell more about what happened then. Stay tuned!