Greyworlding
A couple of the Spacetime Studios guys have put together a fantastic series of blog entries describing their rapid gameplay prototyping process, which they call Greyworlding. Give ‘em a look: though studios are constantly trying new development techniques, it’s rare to get this level of insight into a studio’s new methodologies, even at a conference or other large gathering of developers.
In some ways, “Grayworlding” is a logical, and almost obvious, implementation of the idea of prototyping first to “find the fun”. Anyone who’s actually tried that with a large and complex game knows, though, that the details are far from trivial.
March 13th, 2008 at 10:57 pm
The problem is that something can always be more fun. Where do you stop and say, “okay, that’s fun enough. We’re ready for full production”? It’s a tough call, because most dev houses can’t afford to spend 2-3 years prototyping their gameplay.
March 19th, 2008 at 12:12 am
Sure: the greyworlding technique describes a fast way to find fun in a rough approximation of your final game. The writeup does include vague phrases such as, “Once we all agreed that running and flying through the game area was truly fun…”.
Are there attempts at defining a reasonable, general metric for when you should stop iterating? That seems like an extremely difficult definition, and is where pretty much everyone gets handwavey and says, “well, when everyone thinks it’s fun enough, we’ll stop.”.
I don’t know if I agree that something can always be more fun– maybe it depends on your definition of something. Given your core idea, and the current state of technology, and a reasonable time to implement, and an audience of a given sophistication level, and so on, maybe you’ve come pretty close to the limit at some point. Or does that never happen? More importantly, is there never a case where you’ve hit that point, and know it?
If we look at modern games, do most suffer from a dearth of core fun, or an issue with ramping out to full production? Where does something like Assassin’s Creed fall? Great core mechanic, fun core concept, basic actions are fun– but not for the length of the game. It looks like their prototyping found fun, but perhaps not depth.
March 20th, 2008 at 7:26 pm
I wish I had the answer to all, or any, of these questions.
March 21st, 2008 at 12:53 am
While I like the concept of gray-worlding, I think I’d like to see a lot more of their intermediate steps. I think that is essentially what Matt pointed out… really, I’d like some samples of what wasn’t fun (or… fun enough?), and how they worked through it. You know - first we put the flag here, but it was so far from the ships that the battle would stalemate just trying to get down the hallway. Then we put it here, and it became too easy to score. Then we found the porridge that was juuuuuust right.
I personally would turn Matt’s own questions around on him - what happened with Psychonauts? Were there any iterations of the Milkman Conspiracy that on a playthrough just weren’t fun? (having only the full experience, this is difficult to imagine) Conversely, how many controllers were permanently embedded in screens solely because of Meat Circus; or was it more of a bar where once you got below 3 playtester breakdowns/day, it was probably fun enough?