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What's the MVP equivalent of a game? If you want to make a startup, even if you are planning in two years to have a whole team of devops, etc, you can start sma

by 101008 5y ago

What's the MVP equivalent of a game? If you want to make a startup, even if you are planning in two years to have a whole team of devops, etc, you can start small doing a MVP with one person (or two), etc. I always tried to do something similar but it seems impossible in videogames, unless you are aiming a 2D mobile game.

iaml 5y ago
Early access? Some of the games released this way are very rough, but have at least a level or two worth of gameplay.
markus_zhang 5y ago
We are working on a 3d mobile game and we have both the concept of mvp and vertical slices. Vertical slice is the product we show to management.It's crude and only has the most core elements. No music very few sounds no introduction. Something similar to a prealpha product that you can play with. MVP in our company is like beta products that you put on the stores, those early access ones. You get full audio, polished visuals, full FTUE and the means of payment, etc. Basically a full game but with a bery limited amount of gameplay contents. Say Doom but only with e1m1 and e1m2. Then we grow from there and add a lot of things if it looks good. We first push the MVP (early access) to Tier-3 countries and then gradually open access to all countries if the revenue looks good. We kill it if it doesn't pose a positive return after some tweaking. The majority of programming frameworks are done at this stage but new contents still need code here and there. Eventually you are planning new major features e. g. pvp that needs new frameworks but that's probably months after MVP.
meheleventyone 5y ago
Really depends on who you are selling to. If you look at things as a startup you are selling to both investors and your customers. From a games perspective the customer is actually much more picky than investors and the market is hard to get discovered in. Your MVP is a finished game. For industry investors (publishers) it depends on your pedigree and connections to a large extent. No name, first time indies will find it hard to get a bad publishing deal without a nearly complete game. Well connected industry veterans will have a deal worth millions based on a pitch alone even prior to starting a studio. For more traditional startup investors you need pedigree, an idea of how you'll scale, some evidence that you can actually build the thing and to be in a segment hitting the zeitgeist. For example over the last few years doing something with mobile GaaS, VR/AR, blockchain, cloud streaming/native and so on.
modeless 5y ago
What you do is build your gameplay with the absolute minimum of graphics. For example if you want to build a platformer, start with a red square for your player character, blue squares for enemies, brown boxes for terrain. Do the physics first and add your unique gameplay ideas, but with the absolute minimum of artwork. No sound or music (unless your gameplay ideas require them). Once you have something fun to play with in this state, then you can add art.
- 101008 5y ago
  Yes, but that doesn't sound like a MVP. A MVP (in this case) should be playeable. No one will play a platformer with a red square.
  - cptcobalt 5y ago
    Surely you jest: https://store.steampowered.com/app/220780/Thomas_Was_Alone/ https://store.steampowered.com/app/220780/Thomas_Was_Alone/
    - jayd16 5y ago
      Has a lot of sound and music though. Its an animated square with jump anims etc. A lot more work went into that game than whats described above.
  - atom-morgan 5y ago
    I recently played Super Meat Boy. It's a great game and the character is basically a red square.
  - modeless 5y ago
    Sure they will, if the gameplay is compelling. Maybe they won't pay full price for it (though there are many examples of games with very basic graphics that sell just fine), but an MVP doesn't need to be profitable. What you need at the MVP stage are playtesters who you can validate your gameplay ideas on.
  - notdarkyet 5y ago
jayd16 5y ago
The market is really harsh so I'm not sure you can actually make an MVP without making a polished, finished game. You can noodle on mechanics, art direction, story, etc with a small team before you go into production but you probably won't have an actual viable product coming out of that stage.
- fsloth 5y ago
  Well, there is the Steam Early Access - mind you games need to be at least partly polished and quite playable before entering there. But the public is more forgiving of "early beta" quality at least there. Sometimes alpha if the game is obviously a gem waiting to be polished.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
ermir 5y ago
An MVP in the gaming space is a complete demonstration of your core gameplay loop. For example, an MVP Pokemon game would have one urban and one area with tall grass, 2-3 Pokemon, 2-3 NPCs with dialogue, 2-3 NPCs with that challenge you to battles, a working battle system with 2-3 moves (no need to to stuff like status effects, buffs, types, resistances, etc), wild random encounters. It's quite more comprehensive than an MVP in a consumer product, but even the description above can be cut down substantially. An RPG MVP for example could be just a player character walking around a city. All the graphics for the game above can use placeholders, or even solid colors.
- mikepurvis 5y ago
  Interesting comparing the answers here that are for a "looks-like" vs a "works-like" prototype, ref: https://predictabledesigns.com/the-essential-guide-to-prototyping-your-new-electronic-hardware-product/ https://predictabledesigns.com/the-essential-guide-to-protot... Having no experience in gamedev, I could imagine that as in other fields these milestones are a bit orthogonal. You need a works-like prototype for internal use to confirm the basic questions like "is it fun" before committing to polish, and you need that vertical slice looks-like prototype to do demos, make a sizzle reel for Kickstarter, convince investors, etc. The excellent NoClip doc on Horizon Zero Dawn talks about them actually making a handful of prototypes that explored various aspects of the game's mechanics (combat, traversal, etc) and then having to figure out how to integrate those concepts into a single entity. There are a few clips at https://youtu.be/h9tLcD1r-6w?t=1186 https://youtu.be/h9tLcD1r-6w?t=1186 that show a very early demo of the Thunderjaw concept, with the destroyable parts just as big colored boxes. On the other side of things, it's wild when you look at a game like Hollow Knight: Silksong, for which there was a reveal trailer over two years ago that showed seemingly dozens of fully finished environments, enemy encounters, etc— but in terms of the overall stage of the project, it must have been in alpha or pre-alpha at that point (unless it's encountered some significant unforeseen development barriers): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pFAknD_9U7c https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pFAknD_9U7c
  - HideousKojima 5y ago
    IIRC Silksong was originally planned as a DLC for the original instead of a sequel, which may be why they had so much ready
void_mint 5y ago
What you're looking for is called a "Vertical Slice" in games. The systems you intend to build done as mocks or stubs, used to convey the overall sense a game is meant to convey. You have to build a lot, but it serves the same purpose of checking to see if people actually like a game/its mechanics. Also, in a vertical slice, you can use unpolished game assets or just graybox everything. The point is the "feel", not necessarily any individual look or mechanic.
danbolt 5y ago
There’s traditionally a milestone during production called “vertical slice”, where the developer would present a segment of the game that’s meant to represent the final product. They’re not necessarily considered best practice, since a developer might have to pantomime that the game’s in a finished state when they still have a lot of work to do. Tim Rogers describes it akin to making a cake one slice at a time. Mark Cerny, a developer for a lot of Sega and Sony titles, always suggests an experimental pre-production phase and a structured production. The former is meant to figure out the requirements for the latter and clarify the nature of the product.
jbverschoor 5y ago
The core-loop. For example: - plant seed - harvest seed - use income to buy better seeds rinse repeat
whateveracct 5y ago
What's the MVP of a painting? Or a film? I'd argue that if your goal is MVP, you probably aren't making art. Think sketches and studies and not products imo. That's the path to lasting greatness in gamedev.
- bengale 5y ago
  I suppose for a film it's something like a script or a storyboard. For a painting, I'm not sure because I'm not an artist, but is the investment large?
- Kinrany 5y ago
  If you're trying to sell it, it's a product. An MVP of a painting is a sketch. An MVP of a film is a smaller film with the less important parts of the plot stripped, made with a phone camera and paper decorations in the backyard.
  - whateveracct 5y ago
    > If you're trying to sell it, it's a product. That's kind of my point. Not that no art can be made to be sold. But art made with sales as a primary success criteria is only a subset of art-space. And a lot of the great art out there (video games included) did not originate from that subset.
Kinrany 5y ago
MVP implies sales stretched over time, which is unlike the traditional AAA games and the movies industry processes they copy. An MVP for a game is the cheapest playable version of the game you intend to make. It's hard to say anything else because games are an even more general category than apps: you might find out that you want a physical boardgame.
armagon 5y ago
Here's a good video from an excellent series: Making Your First Game: Minimum Viable Product - Scope Small, Start Right - Extra Credits https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UvCri1tqIxQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UvCri1tqIxQ It's been a while since I've watched it, but I think you should take MVP to mean "what's the smallest game I can build to tell whether it is fun" and not "what is the smallest thing I can build that people will buy".
- yodon 5y ago
  You are correct that the purpose of the MVP (Minimum Viable Product) is to test if the idea is viable. As you point out you can generally assess the viability of a product long before you have a compelling product (Minimum Compelling Product = MCP)
  - armagon 5y ago
    Interesting. I've never heard of an MCP before. I like the idea.
izacus 5y ago
That depends on the size of your company, but for AA/AAA type games, this is usually a so-called "Vertical slice". It's a demo that shows off a small piece of a game working fully (so demonstrating main systems, UI, etc.) that is then used to pitch full development to publishers. It's rought equivalent to a pilot for a TV series: https://askagamedev.tumblr.com/post/77406994278/game-development-glossary-the-vertical-slice https://askagamedev.tumblr.com/post/77406994278/game-develop... EDIT: I just remembered the other alternative - Early Access. This allows the developers to sell the game before it's complete and solicit gamer testing/feedback during the development process while iterating. It's a popular approach for smaller studios.
parentheses 5y ago
Often it's a vertical slice with gameplay mostly done and assets of medium to high quality. Since assets are expensive to make this allows you to build a mostly complete product without cutscenes and 50 levels but without too much effort. You often don't ship this MVP to the public but use it to attract publishers or to demo at game conferences. [Oped below] So much of what makes a game good is art and feel based so testing early and often whether you're on the right track is important. Game studios that are smaller have to do this. Larger ones can take the hit if they make a bad call in favor of controlling the marketing/presentation more carefully. I'm not entirely sure how they test. Similar to developers I think most people in the game development industry have good or reasonable instincts about games that would work.
- throwaway894345 5y ago
  > So much of what makes a game good is art and feel based so testing early and often whether you're on the right track is important. Game studios that are smaller have to do this. Larger ones can take the hit if they make a bad call in favor of controlling the marketing/presentation more carefully. I'm not entirely sure how they test. Similar to developers I think most people in the game development industry have good or reasonable instincts about games that would work. I think I’m in the minority, but I really care very little about the art and feel; I’m die-hard about the mechanics of the game. I hear people ranting and raving about the “cinematic quality of the game art” and I find myself thinking, “I mean, that’s nice, but there are all of these glaring issues with weapon balance and map design, the net code favors laggy players, the time-to-kill is so low that network rather than skill dominates the outcome of almost every confrontation, and the server randomly disconnects people...”. I play a lot of first person shooters, and I rarely care whether the “skin” of the game is futuristic, present day, WWII era, etc as long as the mechanics are right.
  - parentheses 5y ago
    Never saw the responses. I agree with you that the mechanics come first. Game feel is so important. Graphics don’t need to be amazing for good game feel.
  - 5y ago

by 101008 5y ago

iaml 5y ago

Early access? Some of the games released this way are very rough, but have at least a level or two worth of gameplay.

markus_zhang 5y ago

We are working on a 3d mobile game and we have both the concept of mvp and vertical slices. Vertical slice is the product we show to management.It's crude and only has the most core elements. No music very few sounds no introduction. Something similar to a prealpha product that you can play with. MVP in our company is like beta products that you put on the stores, those early access ones. You get full audio, polished visuals, full FTUE and the means of payment, etc. Basically a full game but with a bery limited amount of gameplay contents. Say Doom but only with e1m1 and e1m2. Then we grow from there and add a lot of things if it looks good. We first push the MVP (early access) to Tier-3 countries and then gradually open access to all countries if the revenue looks good. We kill it if it doesn't pose a positive return after some tweaking. The majority of programming frameworks are done at this stage but new contents still need code here and there. Eventually you are planning new major features e. g. pvp that needs new frameworks but that's probably months after MVP.

meheleventyone 5y ago

Really depends on who you are selling to. If you look at things as a startup you are selling to both investors and your customers. From a games perspective the customer is actually much more picky than investors and the market is hard to get discovered in. Your MVP is a finished game. For industry investors (publishers) it depends on your pedigree and connections to a large extent. No name, first time indies will find it hard to get a bad publishing deal without a nearly complete game. Well connected industry veterans will have a deal worth millions based on a pitch alone even prior to starting a studio. For more traditional startup investors you need pedigree, an idea of how you'll scale, some evidence that you can actually build the thing and to be in a segment hitting the zeitgeist. For example over the last few years doing something with mobile GaaS, VR/AR, blockchain, cloud streaming/native and so on.

modeless 5y ago

What you do is build your gameplay with the absolute minimum of graphics. For example if you want to build a platformer, start with a red square for your player character, blue squares for enemies, brown boxes for terrain. Do the physics first and add your unique gameplay ideas, but with the absolute minimum of artwork. No sound or music (unless your gameplay ideas require them). Once you have something fun to play with in this state, then you can add art.

101008 5y ago
Yes, but that doesn't sound like a MVP. A MVP (in this case) should be playeable. No one will play a platformer with a red square.
- cptcobalt 5y ago
  Surely you jest: https://store.steampowered.com/app/220780/Thomas_Was_Alone/ https://store.steampowered.com/app/220780/Thomas_Was_Alone/
  - jayd16 5y ago
    Has a lot of sound and music though. Its an animated square with jump anims etc. A lot more work went into that game than whats described above.
- atom-morgan 5y ago
  I recently played Super Meat Boy. It's a great game and the character is basically a red square.
- modeless 5y ago
  Sure they will, if the gameplay is compelling. Maybe they won't pay full price for it (though there are many examples of games with very basic graphics that sell just fine), but an MVP doesn't need to be profitable. What you need at the MVP stage are playtesters who you can validate your gameplay ideas on.
- notdarkyet 5y ago

jayd16 5y ago

The market is really harsh so I'm not sure you can actually make an MVP without making a polished, finished game. You can noodle on mechanics, art direction, story, etc with a small team before you go into production but you probably won't have an actual viable product coming out of that stage.

fsloth 5y ago
Well, there is the Steam Early Access - mind you games need to be at least partly polished and quite playable before entering there. But the public is more forgiving of "early beta" quality at least there. Sometimes alpha if the game is obviously a gem waiting to be polished.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

ermir 5y ago

An MVP in the gaming space is a complete demonstration of your core gameplay loop. For example, an MVP Pokemon game would have one urban and one area with tall grass, 2-3 Pokemon, 2-3 NPCs with dialogue, 2-3 NPCs with that challenge you to battles, a working battle system with 2-3 moves (no need to to stuff like status effects, buffs, types, resistances, etc), wild random encounters. It's quite more comprehensive than an MVP in a consumer product, but even the description above can be cut down substantially. An RPG MVP for example could be just a player character walking around a city. All the graphics for the game above can use placeholders, or even solid colors.

mikepurvis 5y ago
Interesting comparing the answers here that are for a "looks-like" vs a "works-like" prototype, ref: https://predictabledesigns.com/the-essential-guide-to-prototyping-your-new-electronic-hardware-product/ https://predictabledesigns.com/the-essential-guide-to-protot... Having no experience in gamedev, I could imagine that as in other fields these milestones are a bit orthogonal. You need a works-like prototype for internal use to confirm the basic questions like "is it fun" before committing to polish, and you need that vertical slice looks-like prototype to do demos, make a sizzle reel for Kickstarter, convince investors, etc. The excellent NoClip doc on Horizon Zero Dawn talks about them actually making a handful of prototypes that explored various aspects of the game's mechanics (combat, traversal, etc) and then having to figure out how to integrate those concepts into a single entity. There are a few clips at https://youtu.be/h9tLcD1r-6w?t=1186 https://youtu.be/h9tLcD1r-6w?t=1186 that show a very early demo of the Thunderjaw concept, with the destroyable parts just as big colored boxes. On the other side of things, it's wild when you look at a game like Hollow Knight: Silksong, for which there was a reveal trailer over two years ago that showed seemingly dozens of fully finished environments, enemy encounters, etc— but in terms of the overall stage of the project, it must have been in alpha or pre-alpha at that point (unless it's encountered some significant unforeseen development barriers): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pFAknD_9U7c https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pFAknD_9U7c
- HideousKojima 5y ago
  IIRC Silksong was originally planned as a DLC for the original instead of a sequel, which may be why they had so much ready

void_mint 5y ago

What you're looking for is called a "Vertical Slice" in games. The systems you intend to build done as mocks or stubs, used to convey the overall sense a game is meant to convey. You have to build a lot, but it serves the same purpose of checking to see if people actually like a game/its mechanics. Also, in a vertical slice, you can use unpolished game assets or just graybox everything. The point is the "feel", not necessarily any individual look or mechanic.

danbolt 5y ago

There’s traditionally a milestone during production called “vertical slice”, where the developer would present a segment of the game that’s meant to represent the final product. They’re not necessarily considered best practice, since a developer might have to pantomime that the game’s in a finished state when they still have a lot of work to do. Tim Rogers describes it akin to making a cake one slice at a time. Mark Cerny, a developer for a lot of Sega and Sony titles, always suggests an experimental pre-production phase and a structured production. The former is meant to figure out the requirements for the latter and clarify the nature of the product.

jbverschoor 5y ago

The core-loop. For example: - plant seed - harvest seed - use income to buy better seeds rinse repeat

whateveracct 5y ago

What's the MVP of a painting? Or a film? I'd argue that if your goal is MVP, you probably aren't making art. Think sketches and studies and not products imo. That's the path to lasting greatness in gamedev.

bengale 5y ago
I suppose for a film it's something like a script or a storyboard. For a painting, I'm not sure because I'm not an artist, but is the investment large?
Kinrany 5y ago
If you're trying to sell it, it's a product. An MVP of a painting is a sketch. An MVP of a film is a smaller film with the less important parts of the plot stripped, made with a phone camera and paper decorations in the backyard.
- whateveracct 5y ago
  > If you're trying to sell it, it's a product. That's kind of my point. Not that no art can be made to be sold. But art made with sales as a primary success criteria is only a subset of art-space. And a lot of the great art out there (video games included) did not originate from that subset.

Kinrany 5y ago

MVP implies sales stretched over time, which is unlike the traditional AAA games and the movies industry processes they copy. An MVP for a game is the cheapest playable version of the game you intend to make. It's hard to say anything else because games are an even more general category than apps: you might find out that you want a physical boardgame.

armagon 5y ago

Here's a good video from an excellent series: Making Your First Game: Minimum Viable Product - Scope Small, Start Right - Extra Credits https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UvCri1tqIxQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UvCri1tqIxQ It's been a while since I've watched it, but I think you should take MVP to mean "what's the smallest game I can build to tell whether it is fun" and not "what is the smallest thing I can build that people will buy".

yodon 5y ago
You are correct that the purpose of the MVP (Minimum Viable Product) is to test if the idea is viable. As you point out you can generally assess the viability of a product long before you have a compelling product (Minimum Compelling Product = MCP)
- armagon 5y ago
  Interesting. I've never heard of an MCP before. I like the idea.

izacus 5y ago

That depends on the size of your company, but for AA/AAA type games, this is usually a so-called "Vertical slice". It's a demo that shows off a small piece of a game working fully (so demonstrating main systems, UI, etc.) that is then used to pitch full development to publishers. It's rought equivalent to a pilot for a TV series: https://askagamedev.tumblr.com/post/77406994278/game-development-glossary-the-vertical-slice https://askagamedev.tumblr.com/post/77406994278/game-develop... EDIT: I just remembered the other alternative - Early Access. This allows the developers to sell the game before it's complete and solicit gamer testing/feedback during the development process while iterating. It's a popular approach for smaller studios.

parentheses 5y ago

Often it's a vertical slice with gameplay mostly done and assets of medium to high quality. Since assets are expensive to make this allows you to build a mostly complete product without cutscenes and 50 levels but without too much effort. You often don't ship this MVP to the public but use it to attract publishers or to demo at game conferences. [Oped below] So much of what makes a game good is art and feel based so testing early and often whether you're on the right track is important. Game studios that are smaller have to do this. Larger ones can take the hit if they make a bad call in favor of controlling the marketing/presentation more carefully. I'm not entirely sure how they test. Similar to developers I think most people in the game development industry have good or reasonable instincts about games that would work.

throwaway894345 5y ago
> So much of what makes a game good is art and feel based so testing early and often whether you're on the right track is important. Game studios that are smaller have to do this. Larger ones can take the hit if they make a bad call in favor of controlling the marketing/presentation more carefully. I'm not entirely sure how they test. Similar to developers I think most people in the game development industry have good or reasonable instincts about games that would work. I think I’m in the minority, but I really care very little about the art and feel; I’m die-hard about the mechanics of the game. I hear people ranting and raving about the “cinematic quality of the game art” and I find myself thinking, “I mean, that’s nice, but there are all of these glaring issues with weapon balance and map design, the net code favors laggy players, the time-to-kill is so low that network rather than skill dominates the outcome of almost every confrontation, and the server randomly disconnects people...”. I play a lot of first person shooters, and I rarely care whether the “skin” of the game is futuristic, present day, WWII era, etc as long as the mechanics are right.
- parentheses 5y ago
  Never saw the responses. I agree with you that the mechanics come first. Game feel is so important. Graphics don’t need to be amazing for good game feel.
- 5y ago