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The Cabal: Valve’s Design Process For Creating Half-Life [1999]
- jacques_chester 16y agoAn oldie but a goodie. To me the most important steps were: 1. Creating the demo level with the explicit goal of making it as fun as possible, then deriving a design theory; and 2. Playtesting, playtesting, playtesting, playtesting and then doing some more playtesting.
- InclinedPlane 16y ago0. Finding the sweet spot in balancing quality of experience and ship-date. A lot of game developers are so scared of shipping late that they put out crap as soon as its even remotely stable. They spend most of their effort on the ship-cycle treadmill rather than making the ship-cycle subservient to their desire to make excellent games. The same goes for many other creative endeavors such as software, books, movies. It takes serious guts to take a look at something that is nearly ready to be put in a box and sold to customers, and that has a realistic and high chance of turning a profit, and to say "no, it's not good enough". Even more so when you don't have a clear plan how to "fix" it. On the other hand, it's easy to give in to the temptations of perfectionism and put off shipping indefinitely. Valve has managed to strike a balance, actually managing to ship games people love even after significant rework and even after significant time-lags (Team Fortress 2 spent almost a decade in development).
- jacques_chester 16y agoValve had the luxury of having enough cash-in-hand to scrap work in progress and start over. It was self-funded from the start. Most publishers wouldn't let you do that. So this is one case where the development method is part of the story -- the business story impinges too.