Making Your First Game: Minimum Viable Product - Scope Small, Start Right - Extra Credits

during the last two episodes we've stressed how important it is to make your first game something small but this is so important that this time we're going to dedicate the entire episode to it this will serve you in Goode not only when you're creating your first game but also in prototyping for anything else you do in development there's a term called minimum viable product which refers to the smallest thing you can possibly make that'll still give you useful data once released that should be your goal even when James is called in to work on a multi-million dollar project that has a development time of 3 years one of the first things he'll tell them is that if they don't have a prototype up in the first 3 weeks they're doing it wrong when you can actually play your game you'll discover all sorts of things that you didn't account for when you were just designing the game in your head you'll find edge cases where your mechanics are broken or places where your game just falls apart you'll find what's really engaging rather than just trying to build something that you hope is engaging and you'll discover what will add the most to the exper experience you're creating

okay so you've heard me say cut and cut and cut and that when you think you're done cutting you're probably not done cutting but you do have to stop cutting sometimes so how do we determine when we're down to that minimum viable product well this one is a bit tough and you're going to get better at it with experience but the basic idea is to find the absolute minimum set of features that won't affect core development if you could cut a feature and still technically ship your game it's probably not part of your minimum viable product but because this is as much an art as it is aign let's run through some examples so we're all on the same footing let's start with Super Mario Brothers what do we need in order to test if the fundamental gam play of Super Mario Brothers is engaging what's the minimum that we can build and test before deciding if what we have is something worth expanding upon with additional features well do we need Koopas no firef flowers nope Bowser nope pipe that you can climb down no pipes at all no water levels mushrooms hidden blocks extra

lives no no no no no so what do we need well for Mario the minimum viable product is probably one level where you can move jump and fall into pits that's it if just that much is engaging you'll be able to add all those other features later and make it even better but if running along and jumping over pits doesn't feel good Super Mario Brothers simply doesn't work no matter how many extra features you throw in so you've got to make sure that that core is working first although in this particular case I'd probably throw in two other features that aren't strictly necessary but they will make a big difference first a trigger which resets the level of the player falls into the pit just so testing is easier and to make sure that this aspect isn't just unpalatable to players and second the ability to change from walking to running since the Mario jump mechanic is so dependent on the Run button but that's it one level three features and you've got a game don't believe something this simple could be engaging well set the character to auto run and you've basically built cannibal when building your first game or prototyping

a larger one you'll find that you can strip out all of the content all of the things that aren't rules that control the play itself but rather elements that are created out of those rules so enemy types levels different weapons all of that can usually get cut you might want to include one thing from each category just to test the larger rules but no more than that because it's really easy to get mired down and making all that content and the truth is games with lots of content but without a solid foundation are rarely good perhaps worse as a Creator when your game's packed with content it's generally harder to figure out why the foundation's not working if you test your prototype with a lot of content thrown in it'll be harder for players to put their fingers on exactly what it is that needs Improvement as all of that content just clutters what's wrong and they'll be more likely to tell you about bad pieces of content rather than the underlying reasons why that content didn't create a positive experience it just adds complexity in a situation where you really need to be honing your game's core Foundation okay so let's try another one old school jrpgs now this

one can fool people because most designers tend to think of these games in terms of content rather than gameplay it's easy to get caught up in the story you want to tell or the massive lists of items and enemies but if the player has to SLO through 80 hours of week gameplay in order to access that story you've got in mind you've done your player a disservice in fact that's some of what's contributed to the decline in the popularity of traditional jrpgs this decade so take a game like Final Fantasy 4 here I would cut everything but the menu based combat system I would even cut out all the graphics monsters can just be words on the screen that's really all you need to test the system now many of you might object saying but that doesn't work I can't make that engaging without the content this is actually great though it immediately tells us that we should probably find a more robust system all right let's try one more this time let's look at ikaruga here we could probably cut down to the color switching mechanic an enemy which switches color randomly and shoots random bullet patterns or maybe randomly

chooses from a small list of pre-built bullet patterns as that wouldn't be too hard to construct also you'll need the ability for the player to move and to shoot a counter which ticks upward as you shoot the enemy and a death mechanic that simply resets the game when the player gets hit this will get you all the player Behavior you need to find out if your game's engaging your players will try to dodge and shoot the enemy while attempting to take advantage of the color swapping system as much as possible that's all you need hopefully that helps you frame your thinking about just how small your first project should be now I'm going to give you a quick and dirty list of Game genres ordered by how difficult they are to create a minimum viable product for and this is only going to apply to digital games some of these genres are actually much easier to build pen and paper or board games for also this list isn't by any means absolute as game engines change this list is going to become outdated but it should give you a place to start at least so game genres in order of difficulty to produce a minimum viable product from simplest to most difficult racing game top- down shooter 2D platformer color matching puzzle game 2D

puzzle platformer 3D platformer FPS jrpg fighting game action adventure Western RPG RTS I'm leaving out point-and-click adventure games here as those games are entirely built out of content so while getting a point-and-click game up and running is relatively easy getting anything together that'll actually tell you if you're on to something engaging is a lot harder you'll notice I'm also leaving out anything networked or multiplayer as that generally multiplies the complexity honestly I would just recommend avoiding multiplayer stuff entirely for your first game and again don't think of these genres in terms of the games you know when I say racing game don't think Gran Turismo think two gray blocks on a black background with acceleration and collision mechanics that is all you need to hit that minimum viable product or prototype stage where you can really start to get it out there and play it and learn what's needed to improve it you can always build from there later and add more cool features but your game will be better off for having spent the time testing and

refining the foundation of your game idea this is way more productive than dreaming up a project Which is far too big to ever tackle hopefully that helps you decide where to start and how far to scope down join us on the next episode for what to do once you're done with your game see you then w