I am doing a podcast with my friends about games (check out The Adventure Mechanics here) and I decided that I need to try for accountability on actually releasing a game. To that end, I'm going to go through the development process to release a game. Here is the transcript from the nineteenth episode on working on your game development weaknesses:
Welcome to another adventure mechanics side quest. It's me, Chandler. Today I wanted to talk about something very important to do as a game developer, but many don't actually do. I'm talking about always having your game in a playable state. Sure, a lot of developers usually have *a* version ready, but they then fall back on, "Oh, this isn't the latest version," or "Just wait until you see the new version I'm working on!" whenever someone asks about where their game is in development. I am not immune to this, either. If you've looked at my itch.io page, you'll notice that the last version for Cartogratour is from June 2021 (!), a full two years ago. That's not a great look, honestly. What can I do to remedy this? By always having my playable prototype up to date and ready for feedback. Let's talk about always having a playable prototype ready for play testing.
Right now, Cartogratour is in *exactly* the same state I said they should not be in. The features that I have been working on are in various states of completion, from half-baked to barely mixed together, to say nothing of even touching the oven. That's not great in terms of being presentable, is it? No one wants to play with unexplained features or grapple only partially implemented functions that are supposed make the core of the game. And because of that, there my last version sits, unloved and unplayed. Players that are into development want to be part of the game development journey, not anxiously waiting for a new build that will never come. That means I need to get a new build ready and out. But what is going to go into this new build, or more succinctly, how do you determine what goes into each update? Let's take a short aside and talk about that.
There are a number of schools of thought on what should go into updates, ranging from a constant rolling update train, to well curated semi-annual events. It's up to you to decide your release schedule, but have an idea for how big you want your updates to be. Are you early in development, where each feature is groundbreaking and need to have that new feature attention and bug fixing? Or are you later in the development cycle where it's content time and prodcution can take a while to get everything just so? That will determine where you want to cut off features for your builds, then. Obviously, earlier in the cycle means you want attention on your idea, and making a new build each time you get a new feature mocked up and ready to be played with may help you start building an audience and testers. Be careful when doing this, however. As I mentioned in my talk on getting feedback, everyone will want to suggest changes, many of which will end up radically changing your game, sometimes for the worse. You need to be confident in your feature design and show the people playing your build your vision, not give thme a blank slate to project their desires onto. If you aren't sure about a feature and need time to explore it more, don't include it in your build. If, on the other hand, you want some more eyes on it for whatever reason, wrap it up into a build and start looking for feedback. That's the fun part of game design: You can get feedback on it and see where it takes you.
As you move further into production and (hopefully) have all your features fleshed out, if not complete, you may end up having to wrap your builds around content instead. This is both exciting, since you're marching towards the completion point for the game, and terrifying. Is all that content in this build enough? Did you put enough into it to satiate your audience's need for content, while not expending everything on one update? In this context, I'm thinking of one particular character's story arc, especially if it requires many pieces to be in place before it can all be revealed. In that case, it may make more sense to break up that arc into smaller pieces that can be mixed with the other pieces as they are completed and have the arc follow production that way. It's going to be up to you to try to figure out how to handle that Gordian Knot if you decide to chunk it that way. Planning out content releases end up being a lot harder, at least to me. Looking at my games, though, that's probably not surprising. These aren't the only way to divide up how you make a release, but are merely useful ways to structure your releases.
Now that we've looked at how to parse builds, why would you want to have one ready at all times? Simple: you want to be prepared to give your game to someone at a moment's notice. Think of it as preparing for success. If you get an opportunity to showcase your game and potentially get feedback or build a fanbase, why would you want to show your older stuff? It's giving your game a bad foot to show off if it's not the latest thing you've been working on. Granted, I've said that there are going to be some compelling cases where you won't want to include everything in a build, but that doesn't mean you should be holding back on making builds that best reflect the current state of your game. If you feel that the one feature you've been working on is far enough along to showcase, spin up a build. Worst case scenario, it's not quite what you want and gets some unhelpful feedback. Even that can get more eyeballs on your game, even when it's not done or ready for prime time.
There's another reason to have your game ready to be played at a moment's notice. I don't know about you, but every time I fire up my latest version of my game, it makes me want to work on it more. And when you're in the content mines making yet another quest, mission or whatever and it's dragging you down, that little bit of motivation may be exactly what you need to get over this particular hump. That's not to say that it's going to work every time, but the one time that it does and it prevents you from quitting is a success story in my book. And if you've stuck with me in these rants, you'll know that I want to get more games across the finish line and developers moving onto their next game. At the end of the day, being able to show your work with pride may be enough to keep you chiselling away at that proverbial block and exposing the sculpture that is your game. I'm waxing a bit poetic, so let's get back to the talk at hand.
The last reason you really want your game always playable is to be prepared to show it off whenever there is a good chance to do so. You don't want to be caught flat-footed and miss out on showcasing your game when the ideal opportunity arises. In the same vein, sometimes opportunities will present themselves for you to be the first in the door to have your game reviewed or plugged. With a hit-based industry like gaming, each and every opportunity you fail to capitalize on will potentially limit your game's reach when it comes time to release it to the public. And that means your game is going to wallow in obscurity, along with a mountain of other games from equally talented people. Seriously, look at your favorite genre on itch.io and scroll for a while. You'll see games that absolutely deserve to be recognized, but aren't for one reason or another. Make sure your game doesn't fall into the same fate by making sure you're ready to have the latest version playable at all times.
And on that note, I'm going to be releasing the latest version of Cartogratour at the same time this episode goes live. It's a current snapshot of everything that I have sufficiently done up until this point. There's a number of things missing, obviously, but it includes a basic NPC that will wander around the town tile, a proof-of-concept conversation system that you can progress and a few other things that I'm not going to mention. Go take a look! You can find it on my itch page jcsirron.itch.io. If you want to leave a comment, suggest a topic, or something else, you can post them on our website, theadventuremechanics.com. This has been the Adventure Mechanics, and I'm Chandler. I'll talk to you next time.
