This blog is written for the assignment of the GSND 5110 course. We are required to write out our thoughts about some reading materials.
After reading Chapter 8 of Schell's The Art of Game Design: A Book of Lenses, I feel very touched. Apparently, according to the book, constantly iterating game prototypes is a crucial process for game production; but it seems like over these years, I, as a developer, had never treated iteration as a serious matter.
痛定思痛 ("lesson after pain"), there are two main reasons for this:
- I really dislike losses and starting over.
- Most of my projects simply don't have enough time to iterate.
The first reason is pretty straight-forward: The sunk cost is big and I hate it. I always hated starting things over; what's considered worse is making adjustions on an already finished work. Oh, gee, I hate it so much. There is a thesis I wrote in the earlier half of this year; I was pretty fond of it and worked hard on it. But after it got rejected by a conference, I then don't ever want to open the project for even one more time. It justs feels so yucky to look at the TeX codes. Same thing applies to game projects. If I were asked to add some features to my graduation project just finished a couple months ago, I would definitely respond with a big NO. For prototype iterating, this is a common thing to experience. I guess I'll just have to find a way to overcome this.
The second reason is a harder barrier. For most of my course projects, the time window is rather short, like at most a month or so. Often case it would take about 2 weeks to just make a minimal playable prototype; how could there even be time for us to play test it and then iterate? That is simply something out of my ability to do. So for these kind of projects, I better go for getting things done well in just one strike.