A Shift in Perspective

Welcome back! I have no video for the update this time because I don't have any changes to show off. I'm still not back to 100% and since I'm doing this by myself, those things really throw off my ability to make progress. Maybe one day I'll have a team of people working on games but right now it's just me.

Over these past two weeks, I've taken the opportunity to consider my game, Vanderbuild, and the direction that I was headed in. And as I've mentioned before, I don't like what I've built! I think the game as it stands today is rather boring. Boring can be fixed, but more importantly, I don't see the game exploring the ideas I want to explore without a major change. And that is exactly what I've decided the game needs. So I am going to change from a first-person over-the-shoulder style perspective to a top-down third-person perspective more like what you would find in the typical strategy or tycoon style games, such as Civilization, any of the Chris Sawyer games, or the Anno series of city builders.

While I mentioned the Civilization series, I want to stay on that topic for a minute. Or I should say, I want to stay on the topic of the creator of the Civilization series, Sid Meier. What can I say about how iconic the first Civilization game was? I could talk about how I spent hours and hours in the basement playing it over summer break, while other neighborhood kids played outside in the sun. I could talk about how I loved so many of Sid's games, and the excitement with which I closely followed his story when he broke away from Microprose and started his own studio, Firaxis. But what I really want to talk about is a lesson I learned from his autobiography, Sid Meier's Memoir!, 

In the story, Sid talks about how he was able to consistently create video games with such a higher rate of hits than other contemporary game studios. He did this even compared to other very successful game studios like Sierra. Sid basically describes his approach as what we would call  Lean today. He describes his process of rapid iteration and failing fast by focusing first and solely on prototyping a game to see if it is fun first, before spending any significant effort on the graphics side of things. I'm going to mangle the quote, but he basically says that if a game isn't fun when you have a green blob moving on the screen, then it's still not going to be fun with a richly animated 3D model moving across the screen. If you go back and watch my videos from early dev-logs, you may notice the player's pawn is green. My choice in color is a nod to Sid and this quote.

So how does this apply to Vanderbuild? Well, my definition of 'rapid' iteration might not be too rapid, but by focusing on the game instead of graphics (I'm still simply using Unity's basic 3D shapes) I've discovered that I built something that wasn't fun. This is perfect! It means that I minimized the time and effort I spent building something that I'm not going to use. I don't look at this as a waste, because I've learned valuable lessons from building what I have so far, and those lessons are going to help my adapt and change course going forward. But one thing will not change. I am still going to focus on the game part and leave the graphics refinement until I've built something that I think is actually fun.