2 posts tagged with "studio wtchcrft"

From game design classes to paper prototyping our new game. We’re moving fast over here.

Paper prototyping is the idea of making a physical version of your game so that you can play it as quickly as possible. This doesn’t mean making nice art assets or finding the perfect meeple. It’s very much the idea of a minimal viable product that gets you playing faster.

This doesn’t work for all video games of course. There isn’t much benefit for trying to paper prototype a platformer or a huge open world game. Unless you can boil down a part of those games into a form that can be simplified enough to play by hand.

By having quick access to a playable version of your game idea you can start testing out your design. Do the rules make sense? Is it too easy? Can a player complete the game? Does it need more cards or less cards? If you can paper prototype it, you can test it, toss it, iterate on it, in less time than it would take to program your original idea. It’s this time save that makes paper prototyping so useful. Instead of spending a month developing a minimal digital version you can have something going in an hour. You can even have other people playing it before even opening a game engine. As a young studio with minimal runway, this felt like the obvious path forward for our new game.

So we cut some sheets of papers into smaller rectangles, created a few cards, and started playing.

Game design isn’t a brand new field to me, but I can’t say that I ever studied it formally.

I’ve been playing video games since before I can remember, some of my earliest memories being watching my parents try to beat the first world in Super Mario World on a SNES they won at a gas station on a road trip. They never really played again after that, my brother and I took over the system and eventually breezed past that first world.

Video games have always been a hobby, one that for a long time that I wanted to make into a career. But that still didn’t really lead me to thinking about the deeper levels of game design. Not until I started trying to make games myself, which crashed pretty quickly back in my 20s. And then not again until I started writing D&D adventures.

While D&D is already itself a game with rules and expectations, writing my own one-shots and more serious adventures really helped me get the feeling of what makes games good.

I didn’t realize it back when I was writing A Stolen Sun because I didn’t have the words for it, but the design choices that felt best to be were the ones that I now see aligning with MDA framework. I wanted to create choices and unique rules in my adventures that paired Mechanics, Dynamics, and Aesthetics all together. It’s those design choices that make systems feel alive and “realistic”. Not in a “it happens in real life” way, but in a way that when thought about can make logical sense to a brain. Instead of mechanics that a brain might see as strange and try to reject.

Now coming up with those rules is one thing, but then having to execute them as a DM is a whole other side of the coin! In a way it makes it harder to pull off in a TTRPG because in a video game a computer gets to pull it off instead.

So then still the question, why get back into it now?

Our next game​

As we go through the motions of a game studio; creating a Steam Developer Account, setting up a website, creating press kits, we also need to think of what’s next.

We have two visual novels so far and we’re ready to move away from the traditional visual novel format (visuals, text, choices). Which honestly, is basically just “throw a few more game genres in there” and now you’ve got yourself a narrative game instead of a visual novel.

Since every Steam page costs 100$ to launch we started thinking about how to capitalize on what we have already as a foundation and make it more game-like. This led us to the work we’re doing on Fate Spinner which I wrote about in my last blog post.

But we didn’t just want to jump in blind, we’re both fairly education and learning oriented so reaching a solid understanding of the foundational text, language, and history of game design was important to us. So we started to study.