Early Game Development
As we get closer to the end of 2024 (and our year-end goal), we wanted to share a little behind-the-scenes on early game development for Project Spellstruck.
Six iterations of concept sketches for one of the buildings at Elderwood University.
The early game development stage is an exciting time for any studio. Lots of ideas are thrown around, and there’s a whole world of possibility in front of you. The main challenge is actually honing in. You have to cut a lot of fun and potentially great concepts to find what really works for the game your specific team is making at this specific time.
As much as we all love to dream of the game we’d make with infinite resources and time, no one actually has infinite resources or time. You have to figure out how to take that tangle of ideas and shape it into something shippable in a reasonable amount of time that you can still be proud of. In writing, this type of editing process is often referred to as “killing your darlings.” It can be painful, but it’s a crucial skill to succeed at the highest levels.
Once you’ve narrowed down your concept, it’s time to start laying the foundation of the game. For developers, this is creating the architecture. For artists, it’s environment and character sketches (like the ones above). For writers, it’s brainstorming and outlining. These high-level frameworks then have to be broken down into manageable pieces of work–after all, you don’t just sit down and write the entire story in one fell swoop.
One easy trap to fall into is spending too much time iterating at the high-level. Honestly, the team here at Candlelight probably spent too much time this summer on big ideas when we should’ve been more focused on what would become Project Spellstruck. And that’s okay! Everyone does it. The key is recognizing when it’s happening, making the hard decisions, and moving forward. Spending time lamenting wasted time is just wasting even more time.
An early outline for Project Spellstruck.
On the other hand, it’s important to have a balance. You need a strong feedback loop to ensure your work gets to the quality level you want. Project Spellstruck probably had 5+ full story outlines before we wrote a single scene (and that was after we had some false starts on completely different plots). That may seem like a lot (and it is!), but the cost of fixing a story issue in the outline stage is much cheaper than fixing it at any other point; that’s why sometimes teams choose not to fix it at all. Same with the concept art above; if our artist had started with a full 3-D render, then the iteration process would’ve been exponentially longer.
Ultimately, the goal of early game development is to spend as little time as possible to get to a point where you can move forward with a strong plan for each area of the game. For Project Spellstruck, we have a compelling outline, beautiful concept art, and a working prototype. It’s time for the next phase!