Moving From a Concept to an Actual Game

Hi everybody! It’s well past time for another developer update.

Work progresses on the game as always! There’s a lot I’d like to share real soon. However, I thought it might be a good idea to first write a post where I talk more broadly about what I’ve been up to, rather than focusing on any particular element.

For most of the past year or so I’ve been working on bringing Innkeep from a concept (albiet a quite polished concept!) to a fleshed out mechanical system, with all the major components in place. If you’ll forgive an analogy, one way of putting it is that I’ve needed to finish up with all the outlining (drawing the shape, the form), before starting on coloring in between those lines (adding all the content).

(A prototype expedition system. We’ll have to come back to this another day!)

Imagine the state of the game as a drawing of a man (perhaps an Innkeeper!) A year ago we had some outlines which were quite solid, and even had had some color added in places. But in other places we didn’t even have any outline. For example, maybe where the hands should be, it just said “Hand”. You know a hand is going to go there. You know roughly what a hand looks like, but you still need to draw that hand! Figure out the posing, the size, etc. For example, I knew Innkeep needed a trading system. And I’ve seen quite a few different trading systems in different games over the years. But I hadn’t even given much thought to what our trading system would actually look like. (We now have a prototype in place that I’m quite happy with, and maybe I’ll take a closer look at that in my next post!) The point here is that these are the kinds of things that all need to be worked out, and actually implemented, so that the game’s systems as a whole can come into view and actually be tested. It’s true what they say: when you make a game, you actually have to make all of the game.

(A sneak peek at the trading system prototype.)

I suspect this is a pretty common issue for indie developers like myself who started out with relatively large projects, and just kept plugging away at them. You need to know a lot of different things in order to make a video game (depending on the size of your team). But learning new things can be a bit scary and/or tiring. So, when a novice developer works on a large project by themselves, there’s a general tendency to focus on the things you already feel pretty competent about doing (and that don’t tire you out too much, if you already have a day job!) This can lead to the polishing of elements of a prototype instead of actually finishing and testing that prototype. It’s the equivalent of really putting in those details on the boot of that innkeeper picture, but you don’t really yet know the overall posing. Of maybe it’s a little like that meme of the drawing of a horse that looks amazing at the back but looks like a child’s scribble at the front:

((Source: https://www.alibati.com/work/horse)

This is one of the reasons people recommend that beginner developers make very small projects when starting out. It allows you to move relatively quickly through all the different systems required for completing a functioning game (while practicing those different skill sets) . The Indie Game Clinic has