Innovation SHOCK

I had forgotten the whole farm thing. The stress of that period forced me to blank it from my mind.

Paul’s post below might be a little exaggeratory, but Determinance has gone through some pretty stupid stages before we finally landed back on pretty much what I had designed to start with. When you’re designing something original and things are going badly, it’s a huge temptation to chase obscure ideas. Doing original stuff really is hard, and if you’re doing it my advice to you is to stick to your design document for longer than you want to, and then if it’s still not working you should take a look at which part of your game you actually want to be original in. When people are “being innovative” they often want to do everything differently. Witness Darwinia’s aborted mouse-gestures system. Work hard on the innovative part, and for the other stuff use what is proven and works.

You may think that the designer of a flying freeform sword-fighting game (with techno music) telling you to innovate less is a bit funny. The point is to not innovate needlessly. Determinance’s menu system is, I promise you, not even slightly original. You don’t want an original menu system, it just pisses people off.

I know for a fact that the development of games such as Black and White and Minions of Mirth went through dark periods where the games changed form greatly in a short time. This just happens when you’re properly innovating, but having a very solid design document helps.

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This entry was posted on Thursday, May 4th, 2006 at 7:02 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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