Final Form Games talks about the importance of making good decisions early on in development, and how iteration, prototypes, and testing can provide you with the information you need to make the right choices.

1. Finding the Fun Presented By Tim Ambrogi

3. Fun is elusive, and nebulously defined

5. Chemical

6. Psychological

7. Games I've Worked On

13. Where To Eat? map of philly restaurants

14. Where To Eat? map of philly restaurants colored by price

20. Where To Eat? map of philly restaurants colored by price with constraint lines

21. Bringing It Back Let's bring this back to games. NOTE: In reality, the space of possible games with regard to fun is an erratic, discontinuous, non-linear, high-order multidimensional space far too complex to clearly represent with a single Venn diagram. For now, though, let's suspend our disbelief...

22. Games vs. Not Games venn diagram of games and not games

23. What Genres We're Familiar With venn diagram of game genres

24. What Our Demographic Will Buy venn diagram of our demographic

25. What We Are Willing To Make venn diagram of games we're willing to make

26. What We Have Manpower For venn diagram of games we have the manpower to make

28. All of those are clear-cut and straightforward

29. Far fewer games left after satisfying all of them And we haven't even talked about FUN yet!

30. Fun Height Map height map of fun for tim

31. Different Fun Height Map height map of fun for someone else

37. No Way Out Over-constrained problems are where bad games come from

39. In reality, it's just really confusing

40. Where are the peaks and valleys of fun?

41. How much manpower do you need?

42. These are hard questions that you will be forced to answer

44. Those constraints can lead you to make worse decisions

48. Which programming language?

52. Should he be able to control himself mid-air?

53. How much and in which ways should he be able to control himself mid-air?

54. Does holding down the jump button control the jump in any way?

55. Should he have a double-jump?

57. Crawl the internet

58. Play similar games

59. Talk to peers/colleagues

60. Weigh your options carefully

61. ...

63. Crawl the internet

64. Play similar games

65. Talk to peers/colleagues

66. Weigh your options carefully

67. … and take a guess.

69. Some call guessing 'intuition' or 'design sense'

70. In the case of true innovation, there isn't a lot to go by, since it's something truly new TRUE INNOVATION --------->

73. this outfit would make him

75. better approached using an

76. iterative process

79. Hypothesize solution

80. Implement solution

81. Test

83. How do we come up with a possible solution to the problem?

84. How do we know if the solution worked?

89. Focus Test - Test a product to gain information about how it will be perceived by a group representative of your target demographic(s)

91. Focus Test - Test a product to gain information about how it will be perceived by a group representative of your target demographic(s)

92. Play Test - Test a product to gain information about the gameplay experience

94. Please test your games as early and often as possible

95. Making games without play testing is like playing a game of Mastermind without ever being told how close you were

96. You just don't have enough information to predict fun innovations without testing

98. Camera system

100. Your brain will fill in design holes with optimism and false confidence

101. We've learned that no idea is certain to be fun!

103. It may not seem like it, but it is reckless and risky

106. Our decisions create constraints that limit our solution space

107. Thus we must take care to make good decisions

108. Iteration lets us fix our best guesses until we are confident in them

109. Testing helps us gain the information we need to efficiently fix our best guesses

110. Prototyping

113. The more rapidly we iterate on a feature, the more iterations we will achieve per unit time

114. Each iteration improves the feature

115. Thus, we want to keep iteration time short

117. The goal is to gather information and find the fun as quickly as possible

118. Once you have found it, you can port your findings back into your game with a high degree of confidence

121. Iterating on it via the iPhone SDK couldn't compete with the real-time feedback of Python on Windows

122. Overall it was a massive time savings

123. The Python version of the game had far fewer constraints on it, so it was easier to experiment with different approaches quickly

125. Much of this is extraneous to gathering the information you want

126. A simple prototype can eliminate those details when you need to, and lets you focus on the specific problem at hand

128. Even if you don't have a game ready, you have something you can test and gain valuable information from

129. Dodging bullets cheaply

130. early on can save an

131. entire project

133. The idea was that we could integrate art into the game once we had the fun

134. This removed artistic manpower and schedule as a constraint

135. Prototypes Can Be Blind (Like Justice) Blind Prototype Visual Prototype Final Gameplay

137. Simple prototypes can help solve problems even if they don't implement the feature fully

138. Even partial information gives you a foundation on which to base discussion

140. Prototype isn't a synonym for “incomplete version of the game”

141. You can play with an idea in an entirely different context, and gain a huge amount of insight into its challenges and complexity

142. As you learn more about it, you can start making prototypes that are more integrated into the complete experience

144. Gives you something you can test, and thus get information from

145. Serves as a touchstone

146. Removes unnecessary constraints on the development process

148. Flash

149. PyGame

150. SDL/OpenGL

151. XNA

153. Audio Artists

154. Graphic Designers

155. Programmers

156. Others!

158. Put them together into a scene

159. Try varying the size and number of the various elements to figure out the ideal composition

160. Explore possible cameras that may work

162. Paint particle effects over the render

163. Apply filters to achieve effects such as bloom

164. Iterate on these with fellow artist's feedback as testing

165. Talk with programmers about how to get it in the game

166. Use the prototype (mockup) as a touchstone

168. Create sound effects and queue them up in a test project to play intermittently while you play the game

169. The sound guy actually did this on Booty Blocks, and within hours of our initial audio integration we had polished audio that was very close to final

171. Motion graphics in Flash or After Effects

172. Interface and UI in Flash/Illustrator/Photoshop

173. Can test and iterate on usability in Flash without any of the game in place

174. On Booty Blocks and Jamestown, the animations for HUD feedback were prototyped in Flash, iterated on, and then rapidly ported into the UI engine (not Flash)

176. Don't be afraid to throw away code; you'll do it anyways

177. Having a killer mechanic you know is fun is worth nearly any amount of wasted code

178. When writing a complex core system, iterate on a simple version to figure out a good approach

180. It may seem risky to spend time on prototyping

181. The bigger risk is making an important but irrevocable decision without enough information Give it a try, you won't be sorry!

183. Prototypes and playtests can be used to reduce risk and improve decision-making

184. In the end, what matters is a commitment to creating something testable and iterating on it

185. The rest is optimization!

188. Thank you!