You've missed the word "prototype".

The point isn't to have a perfect game at the end of the period, it's to have something to validate further time investment.

Take a look at the game Braid from prototype/concept to finished product.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Braid-art-1.jpg

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Braid-art-2.jpg

This article is about how to get to something like the first image up and running. If it's fun, then work on making it look like the second image.

The first image still has lots of details in it. I've seen prototypes where everything was either black or green, no gradients no nothing - even the main character was a square!

This reminds me of some very early prototype screenshots from Path of Exile that they released a while ago (long after everything was polished and prettified).

https://p7p4m6s5.ssl.hwcdn.net/public/chris/old/1.jpg

(Source: https://www.pathofexile.com/forum/view-thread/445682)

The guys from DrinkBox Studios have recently published the first pitch video from their current game Severed that was sent around internally after they finished their last game. That’s also an example for a huge leap from concept/idea to finished product.

Pitch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KmFWw3ooDk4

Release Trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CIP35f_SbPI

And you've missed my point entirely. You can have a game that simply _isn't fun, until the point of it actually being polished._

The core essence of a video game is the game feel (which not everyone likes, because it's ill-defined). How does a player interact with a game? Via game mechanics. No amount of polish is going to make up for horrible game mechanics.

Jan Willem (of Vlambeer), who hates the phrase "game feel", talks about it through a simple iterative process of improving game mechanics. See: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AJdEqssNZ-U

That isn't true. No sane company will polish a game before knowing for certain the gameplay mechanics and art direction are final. It just costs incredible amounts of money to pivot at that point so nobody does it.

Heck the projects that yielded the best games where I previously worked at were those who'd iterate like crazy on the prototype until they get down the gameplay mechanics, then throw it all away and start developing the real game sitting on that knowledge.

Polish will make a game better but it won't make it go from boring to fun.

It's a half truth. You can be sitting at a plateau in terms of how the game is percieved until you add a key piece of tech or a particular asset. Ideally, you can prove 100% of the concept in a preproduction state, where everything is functional but placeholder. That is not hard to achieve at small scopes. Sometimes you end up needing to go a little farther, though, as the aesthetics do make a tangible difference. It takes good design skills to know how well developed the concept is, and for really tech-driven stuff you have to try building it to understand it.

That said, it also depends on what elements are critical to the design goals. If you're driven by writing, you had better already have a novel or two of drafts already written before you sink any budget into it. If you're going for a tight set of action mechanics, expect to spend a long time looking at a prototype with a bunch of colored shapes.

There are many stories of wasted work in AAA, and a lot of it stems from being too hasty to pull the trigger on production and expecting the people making work at final quality to pull rabbits out of hats and fill in a lot of missing blanks as they go along, only to be sent back to the start for a retake of entire scenes.

Eeeeeh, "final" is such a strong word. They won't (or shouldn't) spend much time polishing assets before they've sufficiently tested out (and polished) the core gameplay. But yeah, they shouldn't invest too much until they're confident that the game's going in the right direction.

Can you give an example? (I don't mean to be snarky but I'm actually curious)

The Stanley Parable? I mean, without the script and voice acting, it would seem pretty dull.

Wouldn't you prototype the script? Just having a stage direction [SOMETHING WEIRD HAPPENS] would work in lieu of transforming a 3D environment.

I bet you could protoype The Stanly Parable in a week in Twine/Z-code.

That game went through so many revisions and prototypes. I remember playing an early version which was just a HL2 mod, barely resembling the current incarnation.

Point and click adventure games seem like a good example - the mechanics for these are usually a pretty small part of what makes them fun. Awesome and polished art, sound, plot etc. are what matter.

Dark Souls, maybe. Without the polish I can't imagine it would be more frustrating than fun.

Not at the prototype level where you don't care about balance issues but rather gameplay mechanics.

Good assets can't polish turd. A solid core, however, can benefit from assets. They mention this point in the article.

A better counter argument would be a game which was completely abstract, hence not fun, being made fun with content.

So in counterstrike, if you were abstract blobs, the goal might be confusing, and not fun. But your not, you either want to blow up, or save, a building (assets assist communication.)

Good assets sold turds at the beginning of most previous console cycles. This is likely a thing of the past, in this new era of vastly diminishing visual returns for dollars spent. Hitting that top-tier of fidelity that previously was able to ship games on screenshots alone is now so hideously expensive that few publishers are willing to risk it.

If you remove all of the sounds from Minecraft, all of the textures, all of the composite models and replace them with wireframe hitboxes, I doubt you'd have something as fun as the hit title.

Prototypes are not good indicators that something could be fun.

I played a very early build of Minecraft, when Notch posted it to an IRC channel I frequented at the time. It had primitive but recognizable voxel graphics, and almost no features. But the basic principles of exploration and building were there.

I can tell you with certainty that very early and unpolished prototypes of Minecraft were fun, and that the potential was obvious. (Though of course no one could predict just how huge Minecraft became.)

That's completely false and grossly overlooks what makes games fun in the first place.

Prototypes are your absolute best indicators to determine if a project is worth investing into to reach completion or not. Because you find your fun factor at the prototype level.

You'll get at most better visuals, sounds and more balance in the game with polish. If your mechanics aren't fun to begin with, polishing them will do absolutely no good.

> I doubt you'd have something as fun as the hit title.

I doubt it too.

> Prototypes are not good indicators that something could be fun.

This is what I disagree with. The prototype won't be as fun as the final product (because otherwise, why bother polishing in the first place?).

Take Infiniminer, an obvious source of inspiration for Notch. It's only got the very minimum of features; it's kind of a Minecraft prototype. It's also got the features that originally got me into Minecraft: building arbitrary structures in a large virtual environment. Minecraft is better fleshed out, of course, but the core of the game is there.

There's going to be a point where you've got the irreducible kernel of a game concept. That is the prototype. Remove items, crafting, mobs, infinite world sizes, lighting, and textures from Minecraft, and you've still got the kernel: a virtual building kit. It's an awesome idea, fun on its own, and expandable into a "real" game with goals, achievements, etc. It's a great indicator that a fleshed-out version of the game may be fun.

Now, you can't build something smaller than a kernel of the concept, call it the prototype, and make a judgement based on that.

Minecraft WAS infiniminer

At the beginning, yes. The beginning alpha/demo version was. Infiniminer was like the prototype, and the demo was like the engine reimplementation when it was at the same level of development, when the previous dev team quit and deleted the original source tree (not literally true; I'm speaking figuratively).

It was a clone with aspirations of becoming something greater.

I think at some point you have to use your imagination and intuition to fill in the gaps. This is something you have to do at many stages of the process anyway right? A prototype let's you confirm that your basic ideas are sound and you can focus on imagining the other aspects that bring it all together.

> why don't other voxel-based games ever seem just as fun

But this is the opposite of your point. Other games resemble Minecraft superficially and maybe offer some crafting, but none have anything like Minecraft's deep mechanics.

Minecraft hits the right notes to by psychologically satisfying, too. The feedback the player receives for thier decisions makes the initial parts of the game exciting.

You feel validated for expressing yourself, much like a strategy in Counter Strike or picking a team in Pokémon.

Yes, but what are those notes? That's my point. You can't prototype a voxel game and expect it to basically be Minecraft.

How on earth are you going to get a Minecraft if you prototype voxels?

If you want to make a Minecraft then prototype that instead a single aspect of its visuals.

It's the opposite of my point because I'm asking in point of argument why someone would be true.

"If X is true and Y is X, why is Y false."

The problem with your point here is that Y isn't X.