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A little forewarning, this will be a bit meandering and a fair bit anecdotal. Anyhow, last Tuesday I was heading out to my school's little game development club. We just recently got one, odd in context of the fact we've had a game design program at the school for a while. Anyhow, I gathered up one of my game development team members and went to head out to check the whole thing out. I figured it might be a good chance to recruit some extra faces and flesh the team's weak points out. Needless to say, I was pretty wrong on that count. We left an hour in, having largely wasted the time to walk out there. But that isn't what is so important...so much as what it brought to my attention while sitting there. A core philosophy difference that I've seen quite a few times but never really in such a direct contrast. One that I glanced over at my friend when we were leaving and kind of explained what we'd just seen.
There's always been a kind of stress notable in the amateur game development area that I've seen. Folks who'll come up with the most ambitious designs, write hundreds or even thousands of pages of documentation plotting it all out. These folks tend to be highly imaginative, creative, and all about the design. It comes first. First development lead I worked with happily chanted that design was eighty percent of the process and that everything else just flows smoothly from there. These guys... they're designers. That's the heart of the process. Creating a grand vision above all else.
Then there's the other group. Folks who don't care so much about the design. They're there to make games and the first thing they consider is how they're going to get some concept built. It doesn't have to be necessarily a good concept. I consider myself one of these. The game I'm working on now had an alpha nearly finished before the design documents got to their first complete draft. Eighty percent of the process? You can't finish a game like that. It doesn't work. There's things that can't be perceived that far ahead of time and adaptations that simply evolve from building. The whole philosophy of game design evolves from how to develop this. Folks like this I label developers and when I think about it, a good deal of those who think like this make up the industry.
Yeah, I'm a little biased. Maybe a lot. But it seemed so clear to my eyes when I was sitting there. The group got down to business and the guy leading it had lists of those who were involved and wanted to form game development groups and their skills. He was pretty bright, got off a decent game a year back with fairly nifty AI system. But anyhow, his first question was to ask the entire group to come up with designs. I sort of stared at this personally, not having terribly much invested in the whole proceedings. How could any group come up with any meaningful designs without considering what tools they had to work with? It'd be silly. And anyway, even if they did, what would be the point if they weren't working on that idea? We kind of sat off to the side with a small business group that was doing the same thing we were: scouting the club out and seeing if it had some good potential recruits.
It's really interesting to consider though how much these two philosophies tend to clash in game development, at least on the amateur levels. The distinction between the two philosophies really makes so many arguments over game design fall nicely into a clear separation of how the people think games should be made. Design first? Or develop and let the design flow from what can be accomplished. Even with the fact that many fall in the middle, so many discussions can be broken down to just that philosophical difference.
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