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8 CRUCIAL POINTS TO DEFINE BEFORE STARTING A COMMERCIAL GAME

• by Admin
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This blogpost is a humble share of our internal guideline at attempting to face the reality of keeping alive a company and 5 people along the way. This is not perfect and certainly not waterproof… your company can still sink. We are currently in the process of deciding what game we will be making after REPULSE: Galactic Rivals at IronEqual. MAZE’s team is still working on MAZE, no worries. As we must support all the company fees, needs to eat and pay for those private jets’ hangar fees, we obviously have commercial ambitions with our future games. In this idea, I will share with you guys our process and what we must think about before starting to heavily invest into a production. It’s totally fine to make a game without commercial purpose, but please don’t fill my twitter feed with your whining about how broke you are or that there’s no money in the gaming industry.

1. Everything starts with the fun and the creative

Our first step is obviously to fuck around and get some prototype running to check if there’s some fun potential. If you’re happy with your first prototype, it’s time to define a lot of things that will allow you to keep a healthy & straight development and check if there’s some commercial potential. Always keep in mind, what you wrote down at the very beginning of your design is meant to change.

2. Design + Story

As you’ve supposedly validated some design points with the prototype, it’s time to write them down. You should define what your intentions are, what game you want to craft and detail a bit about your design components, mechanics, backstory/universe, the pace and try to draft a game loop. That will help you not to get lost after a few months of development and clearly identify if you’re starting to change the very core of your game. Listing your references can help you be a lot more aware of them and share them with the team.

3. Art + Sound

Here, you’re going to define your art direction, the identity you want to give to your product, the colorimetry and all that stuff. You can also talk about your intents and inspirations regarding the sound design & music. We do make a split between art & design but only for presentation purposes. Always remember that in games, art serves design & design serves art.

4. Market Study

Finding your audience is not just a people-in-suit thing. Neither is it something you should do at the end solely to market your game. Defining and researching your audience is important to make design & art decisions. This is how you can put yourself in your players’ shoes. Your core audience has to be a lot more precise than “Dota players”, “FPS players” or “Hardcore players”. Your core audience is an intersection of your game mechanics, your story and your art style. Try not to be biased while you are researching your audience, you can make data say pretty much anything. It’s okay to make a niche game. Don’t do this.

A Lifelong Pursuit

Success in business continues to be about more than money for John Carmack and Romero. Despite earning millions of dollars from excelling at their professions, they’re both pursuing new, more challenging business goals. Today Carmack is chief technology officer for the virtual reality company Oculus Rift. Romero is developing video games for the next generation of gamers from Galway, Ireland.

5. Production

Here you will define the scope of the project and a potential retro planning. You can split your scope in 3 parts: the core gameplay, the features and the content. Features add value and fun to a game but should not be vital. Keep in mind, you can’t save a game with features. Content is probably the most scalable depending on your funding and schedule. But try to define a minimal content quantity that makes the game interesting. For instance, on Subscribe & Punch (a 2D fighting game), we defined the minimal number of characters at 4 to keep the game interesting. With more time and/or funding, we can make 6, 8 or even 20 characters! Content is also the easiest way to shove DLCs down your players’ throats BUT adding features is probably what is going to have a higher perceived value (or fix your core gameplay, but if you’re down to this point, you should not be fucking around on Medium). With your scope and the planning, you can define your needs in term of team and budget. Please, if you don’t have enough money to make the game your envisioned don’t stupidly cut your game. Try to really see how you can make a full-fledge interesting game for the fund you have.                        

6. Challenges

It’s important to list early-on what your biggest challenges will be. It will tremendously help you avoid them. You can also define some KPI that will allow you to measure how well you’re doing on those challenge. It’s important to be optimistic most of the time. Not here. Don’t lie to yourself and try to identify as rationally as possible what could go wrong.                        

7. Marketing & Communication

You can define the platforms where you’re going to market your game and make a list of potential influencers (it can also help you define your target). Also, think about the tone you will use to communicate about your game, it says a lot on the overall universe of the product. Try to communicate as soon and consistently as possible. Nobody is going to steal your game and if it does happen, just make a better one.                

8. Business

Here you can lay down a ball pit about your pricing while taking into consideration your scope and your audience. Not too high, not too low. Your game needs to seem like a good value for the player. You can also define the platform you wish to release your game to. With all the previous informations, you can calculate how much units you have to sell to break even.