Getting your game vision right at the concept stage | GI Sprint

gamesindustry.biz:

Often, one of the biggest problems in game development is knowing what you are meant to be creating.

Organisational psychologist and Team Sync founder Graham McAllister has been grappling with how to identify and solve this issue in recent years, inspired by Jason Schreier's article on the troubled development of Anthem for Kotaku.

In the interest of time

1. Be careful with how you talk about a game idea; make sure that everyone knows what the vision for the project is with precision

2. Make sure you lock down the vision for a project in the concept or pre-production stage. That way you won't waste time or put unnecessary stress on your team.

3. Allow questions from your team; if someone doesn't know what the vision is, staff need to be able to tell you that

4. Play your game together. The more you know about your project as a team, the better your work will be.

But the problem is not unique to that game. To pick one recent example, Creative Assembly's now-cancelled Hyenas is reported to have had a budget of around $100 million, but developers who worked on the project – speaking anonymously – have said that the game's vision was unclear for much of the seven years it was in the works.

Speaking to GamesIndustry.biz boss Christopher Dring for GI Sprint, McAllister explains why aligning on a vision can be immensely challenging and also details ways that developers can overcome this problem.

You can watch the full discussion below, download it here, or find it on the podcasting platform of your choice.

The biggest problem when it comes to the early stages of game development, McAllister explains, is how you communicate what the vision for the project actually is. What is shared and interpreted by another person is often incomplete, lacking vital information and, as it is shared across a development team, deviates further and further from the initial vision.

Thanks to this incomplete idea, every single person can have a slightly different mental model of the game vision as