We know the drill, but we don't call it that at first. We call it creativity, ideation, brainstorming, preproduction, a concept, inception -- take your pick. The first time we try to design a game it's often this big bloated concept, simmering in some cauldron we were waiting to pull out from under a bunk-bed we've already outgrown.
It sounds like such a thrill in our heads, "This is a chance to make that game I've always wanted to." When you get to this point, where the spark is lit and feature creeping begins to boil over in your mind, I offer a critical question worth asking yourself: Is it the game you want to manifest, or the spirit of it?
I narrowly avoided a trap set by one such big-idea myself: narrative. This isn't to say that narrative is impossible to achieve in games-academia. However, there are more or less cumbersome ways we can explore it with the tools game development provides at this level.
Two years ago this fall, I was in a seminar class for my major where we had to create a singular narrative-focused work within our emphasis/medium. Being a digital arts program, our class surveyed the land of this concept primarily through video, animation, sound, and game design.
To tell an audio-visual story is immediately time-consuming. It calls upon all of the aesthetic devices necessary to tell the story with, and those devices don't just create, animate, and texture themselves. In film, for instance, we already have our very own world and those populating it to artistically document.
If it's the game you want to make, then first things first: make a design document. Shall we?
What do you want to say or accomplish with this game? Is a game the best medium for this idea? If so, what are the game rules? How many players do they accommodate? What's the visual style? What will it sound like? What engine will you use to run the game? If you don't have a game engine, what language of code is it going to be written in? Who's going to write all that code? What's the incentive for the player to keep playing? Is there a narrative behind, or driving the game experience? Who's your intended audience? What platform/s will it be playable on? What's your role on the team, or are you working alone?
It doesn't take much before running into a "me-too" situation. If there's a game or genre you want to closely emulate as a student, consider what that means. Consider how such games might have answered the questions above, and you may recognize how complex and unwieldy they can be for the constraints of a bachelor-degree seeking student. I ask such questions because they're the ones most players aren't programmed to ask for you.
Unfortunately, there's a growing rule of thumb that the fifteen week college semester is not so accommodating for narrative-heavy game projects. I found ways to follow this rule, only to break it every other time I came to actually work on my project.
Those of us with a game design emphasis met about the issue a number of times, partly because collaboration in this course was prohibited for the semester. Our consensus was that making mods and custom content for games that already existed, with worlds and art assets that already existed would be the most effective way to explore narrative in games with what time we had.
Seven weeks in now, and production finally starts for everyone. There goes half the semester.
