“Valve’s got a great process. They run through it. They iterate like crazy on stuff. They throw stuff away when it doesn’t work. They find ways to rapidly prototype. I think everything else in games gets iterated a gazillion bazillion times. When I look at these poor level designers and how much of their work gets thrown away, it’s heartbreaking. But, it’s what you have to do to get a piece of art finished.
It’s the same with writing. Once people make that connection, ‘Oh, good stuff takes time. If I want the writing to be good, I’ll have to invest some time in it.'”
— Game writer Susan O’Connor
(via Gamasutra)
This is just what’s stewing in my brain right now.
Valve’s process works best when you can set your own ship dates.
Blizzard’s, too.
Still, throwing stuff away when it doesn’t work is worthwhile. Otherwise you’re shipping stuff that doesn’t work.
“Still, throwing stuff away when it doesn’t work is worthwhile. Otherwise you’re shipping stuff that doesn’t work.”
Agreed. I guess I’m just a little cynical about going “well, we can just throw away labor for as long as we need to” when neither of my industries work that way for most of the participants.
As a roleplaying designer, I’m also suspicious of the “works/doesn’t work” binary. There’s such a thing as covering ninety percent of cases, and sometimes you have to settle for that.
This is particularly true when you’re building a product with multiple gameplay models… something Blizzard does but Valve doesn’t.
Ha, right. Never “throw away” anything. It doesn’t hurt in the slightest to save it, you never know when one project’s “throw-aways” will become useful for another.
I agree with your “Never ‘throw away’ anything” sentiment, but I definitely throw out something in a game when it doesn’t work. I’ve got a whole archive of proposed sub-systems that got some testing and were interesting but unnecessary or didn’t fit the system philosophy. I’m a big fan of the pack half theory. There are a lot of things that might improve a play experience in some circumstances but aren’t an improvement in the play experience overall.
We all have different values for “thrown away,” of course.
When I’m writing, I keep a file open for the current project called “[PROJECT NAME] clippings,” where all the good stuff that comes out of the project goes as it is “thrown away.”
It’s not like I’m citing this quote as a One True Way.
“When I’m writing, I keep a file open for the current project called “[PROJECT NAME] clippings,” where all the good stuff that comes out of the project goes as it is “thrown away.””
I do the same thing (mine’s called “Stuff the author knows”) in case something I’ve cut needs to go back in. It rarely does. Sometimes I’ll think about using it in a different project, but as far as the original writing’s concerned, I’ve thrown it away.
That’s funny; I’m an optimist, but I call my equivalent clippings file “[projectName] Dumpster.”
The critical thing, I think, and the thing I’m not all that good at, is the practice of making continual changes even when the thing seems good enough already. Probably, this is because of the aforementioned optimism, which inappropriately bridges the gap between “good enough” and “good.”