It was quite a packed house tonight at Mister Tramps.  I caught the first half, and due to the excessive heat and my general need to get work done on my personal pursuits (rather than listen to folks talk about it), I left at intermission.  However, I would say that Dan Teasdale of Twisted Pixel gave a most rip-roaring 10 minute speech on how the industry is NOT dying, and how utterly broken the financial analysis model is due to lack of information on their part about downloadable titles and DLC.  Everyone had a number of good chuckles there.  A fellow from Louisiana, whose cajun name unfortunately escapes me, also gave a great talk describing the desperate need for game companies to inject life into the development process by having little Indie Game Jams internally.  It’s a clever concept, actually, and one I agree with.  On a long game, there’s a lot of ideas that would come and go without finding an outlet otherwise, but could just be the most valuable idea a company might produce, if it were made into a prototype.

Speaking of prototypes, we’ve been working on a number of different game ideas for the past several months.  You know, good game design usually starts with limitations.  Ueda-san, producer on Team Ico, said Ico and Shadow of the Colossus were both subtractive designs, where anything that distracts the player from the game’s core should be lessened or removed entirely.  You can argue that those games are remarkably empty compared to other games, but what they are full of is incredibly rich.  As I said, limitations create great game design.  Working in the industry at companies, there’s rarely much prototyping going on before the game a team will make has been decided, often for business reasons rather than as a conscious agenda stemming from story and design or even gameplay concepts.  Consequently, I didn’t have much (recent) experience with simple prototypes and game design, even after 15 years.  After the past few months of producing several vastly different prototypes, I see how limitations can be opportunities for creativity, and how prototyping is a very valuable tool for discovering what is just a terrible idea without putting too much money into that discovery.  Tonight, there were some great ideas thrown around and got me thinking about how–if ever–we could apply the notion of internal Game Jams if Steel Penny Games were to grow enough to have larger projects in development

That said, I’m really happy with the current art style and game design we’ve settled on.  The limitations are partially in the game design, and partially in the company, since we’re a completely self-funded operation… one of the few professional full-time indie shops.  Learning to turn limitations into opportunities is an acquired skill, one that we’re just beginning to realize effectively.

Now, back to work on my codebase so we can get the prototype into production!

JH

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