On Monday 9th February, we had a guest lecture from two WSA Game Design & Art alumini students that have since formed their own little indie studio in Brighton- Canteen.
Their works so far are two games: Corponation: The Sorting Process, a sci-fi work simulator game, and their upcoming title Remote Control, which is a first-person game that has the player controlling of a group of people on a derelict spaceship.
Their main focus or aim is to create games that ‘feel like reading a sci-fi novel’.
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The focus of their talk was project management – using their experience as a 2-person indie team they came to give us advice about how we should structure our game development and production.
There were 12 main takeaways from their presentation:
- 01. Making games is about iteration – start simple, protoype and slowly scale up.
- 02. Playtest as much as possible! Feedback is absolutely key.
- 03. Game dev is a marathon, not a sprint; their first game was supposed to take 8 months, ended up taking 3.5 years!
- 04. Set goals, work in milestones to keep everyone on the same page during development.
- 05. Work backwards to set milestones.
- 06. Keep track of your progress – feeling like you’re making progress is really important for motivation.
- 07. Watch out for bottleneck and dependencies. Expect the unexpected!
- 08. Have a solid foundation – gameplay pillars in particular are key.
- 09. Aim for less at a higher quailty; quality over quantity.
- 10. Don’t leave things until the end – things WILL get out of hand very quickly.
- 11. Don’t neglect the player!
- 12. Games need plenty of tutorials – players do not understand your game like you do.
This talk was very helpful and gave us a strong outlook into the inside world of game development, and certainly gave us a lot of tips on how to go about constructing our game.
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After the talk, we were given the oppurtunity to talk with them both in our team: they were very happy with how we were getting on so far and had no major feedback to give us.
We also had the chance to ask them questions at the end as a class, and I asked them how they recieved funding for their games. They told me their story of how PlaygroundGames found them at a games convention and were quick to offer them funding – telling me that once you have a portfolio, the difficult part isn’t finding the funding but moreso winning them over with a strong gameplay concept.
This actually has made me significantly more confindent about being able to find a secure future in games, and so I took the advice very happily. (I am still building up the skills and portfolio of course, but I feel like I’m exceptionally good at creating scalable game concepts that are fun and also explore new concepts – my best example of this perhaps being Backchat.
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I also made a good deal of development progress this week on my prototype. You can see the developments I made on this page.
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