Game Development Reference
In-Depth Information
The
concept stage
, which you perform first and whose results do not change
The
elaboration stage
, in which you add most of the design details and refine
your decisions through prototyping and playtesting
The
tuning stage
, at which point no new features may be added, but you can
make small adjustments to polish the game
This topic uses the term
elaboration stage
rather than
development stage
because the
latter runs the risk of being confused with
game development.
Figure 2.6
shows the
three stages of the design process.
FIGURE 2.6
Three stages of the
design process
ELABORATION
STAGE
CONCEPT STAGE
TUNING STAGE
Each of these stages includes a number of design tasks. In the sections that follow,
we look at each stage and the different tasks that you perform in each.
Chris Bateman and Richard Boon discuss the relative merits of various design pro-
cesses in Chapter 1 of their book
21st Century Game Design
(Bateman and Boon,
2006). Look at it for further discussion on the subject.
NOTE
Unfortunately,
the game industry
has not yet adopted
standard names for
its design elements,
processes, and docu-
ments. This topic uses
terms that other pro-
fessional developers
would generally rec-
ognize, but you cannot
expect any given
company to use these
terms exactly the way
they are used here.
If you get confused,
please see the Glossary
at the end of the topic
for the definitions of
terms used in the topic.
The Concept Stage
Client 2: Do I take it that you are proposing to slaughter our tenants?
Mr. Wiggin: Does that not fit in with your plans?
Client 1: Not really. We asked for a simple block of flats.
Mr. Wiggin: Oh. I hadn't fully divined your attitude towards the tenants.
You see I mainly desig n slaughterhouses.
—M
ONTY
P
YTHON
'
S
F
LYING
C
IRCUS
, “T
HE
A
RCHITECT
S
KETCH
”
In the concept stage of game design, you make decisions that you live with for the
life of the project. This stage establishes things about the game that are so funda-
mental, changing them later would wreak havoc on the development process
because a great deal of the work done to implement the game would have to be
thrown away. It's like constructing a building: You can revise the color scheme
and the lighting design while it's still under construction, but you can't decide that
you really wanted an airport instead of a hotel once the foundations are poured.
