Another of my favorite sessions at the GDC '06 was titled How to Prototype a Game in Under 7 Days. It was somewhat of a followup on the previous years' GDC presentation about the initial Experimental Gameplay Project since the fantastic session brought about such a slew of "how are you making these games so quickly?" questions from the crowd.

For one thing, the Experimental Gameplay Project is the source of an immense amount of fun. There are a ton of great and crappy games on that site from the project's entrants. It's a terrific, incredible, amazing resource to see how some other innovative game designers think. Anyway, back on topic...

The EGP folks posted the slides from the session, if you'd like to check it out... honestly, start by reading the above-linked Gamasutra article before sapping 50MB from the EGP servers, eh? Only snag that puppy if you're really interested in seeing more.

At any rate, I highly recommend reading up on this session as it's a great view into the minds of some rapid-prototyping game designers.

"Agile Software Development" is a development method that pushes for many iterations and increments to the product instead of a more pre-design based production. Agile methods have proven to be very effective in many software development projects due to the ability to increment features based on immediate needs instead of holding true to a design document written before all the variables/problems/needs were known. This lends itself very nicely to game design, as it turns out, especially since you don't always know what's going to be fun until you actually create it and play it. With some types of software, Agile doesn't clearly make sense since you may know exactly what the software must do and you just need to set out to create it. Very few (if any?) video game designs remain unchanged from early design to ship day.

Agile is rather difficult for me to explain in a paragraph since I'm rather new to the concepts myself. Here's a great blurb from the Agile Software Development website that starts the topic off very nicely:

...Agile Methodology focuses on an iterative and incremental approach to the creation of games.

Most games are developed in phases...a design phase is followed by a prototype phase, followed by production and then an Alpha/Beta phase at the end. This approach assumes that if we create a big document and plan and develop to that plan, we can create a game that not only meets its budget, schedule and scope, but also be fun.

My experience has been that we don't really answer the important questions with documents. The only real proof of the value of your design idea is the actual running game. Since we really don't see the game running until the end (when it's too late to change our design), the quality of the game suffers. Not only that, but the uncertainty in budget and schedule leads to chronic crunch time.

If you'd like a more core view of Agile methods, maybe the Agile Manifesto principles can help guide you more... maybe it just confuses things.

Well, here's why I like the idea of Agile... I love prototypes! I actually have a lot of complete game design ideas that are almost only prototypes to bigger development studios in that they only serve the purpose of providing a single, focused play experience. There was a lot of talk this year at GDC about prototypes, mainly revolving around Spore since it is known to be extremely prototype-driven in its development and design. In fact, it turns out that almost everything created for last years' incredible Spore demo by Will Wright at GDC '05 (you MUST watch that, IMO, even if there's a lot missed from another slide screen not shown), and even the subsequent demos at that years' E3 Expo... were essentially very advanced prototypes! They have since started from scratch (essentially) to create the game based on what they learned from all those prototypes/testing! Wow. Not many projects are built this way, mostly because of the pressure from publishers to ship the game, and such gunk like that... money, time, etc.

So this all leads me to value the prototypes again, and it seems to put my path squarely on track with Agile Game Development as one of the most viable development options for me. I'll dig into it further and see how it goes, but it looks really interesting... and exciting.

I'm also going to subscribe to the Agile Game Development Blog, I think. There's some great info in there and I think it will help motivate me on how to use these methods better. I'll add that blog's feed to Game Dev School, too... I think I'll be talking about this stuff more! Nice.