Gamasutra featured a fantastic article recently from a group of Carnegie Mellon’s Entertainment Technology Center. The Experimental Gameplay Project created 50 games by 4 grad students in 1 semester! One of the Hits was the World of Goo, which our team used last week to demo a great new design and was downloaded 100k times in the first few month of being released.
- Enforce Short Development Cycles: Twice as much work does not mean twice the quality
- Prototype themes like ‘gravity’ or ‘springs’ to constrain creativity and generate more
- Develop in Parallel: Only the Beginning and End of a design project benefit from a team
- Spend time gathering concept/inspiration art. It makes a big difference (but will not fix a bad design)
- Do things quick and simple – Cheat often
- Don’t over engineer and make things general and reusable, make them specific to see if they really work
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