How supporting core loops and early prototyping are key to your game's success
Successful game development requires distilling your game down to a core experience and pinpointing the weaknesses in its design. That's why it's so important to identify and itemize the systems that comprise your core loop, and prototype them as soon as possible.
Dan Spaventa (lead game designer on the Game Insights team in Developer Relations at Roblox Corp.) has been thinking a lot about core loops lately, and shared his knowledge on the topic at the platform's Connect 2022 developer event.
What are core loops? Why is prototyping so essential? Spaventa laid out some key basic foundations of the game design process that will be help beginning developers establish the most important parts of their game, and test them as early in the design process as possible.
The core loop of a game can generally be described as its central conceit, the gameplay upon which the entire game is built. Fleshing out this core gameplay loop and testing it can help identify its weak links early in the process, and allow them to be addressed individually with minimal waste in terms of time and resources. If your core loop isn't fun, it doesn't matter how great your narrative or physics interaction or other features, if they are not having fun "minute to minute", they are going to drop off and stop playing.
Core loops, as Spaventa explains, can be broken down into the set of actions most repeated in the game. In RPGs, for example, this is roughly, "Explore, Fight, Upgrade". In the game baseball, it can be summarized as "Throw Ball to Pitcher, Field Ball, Return Ball to Pitcher". Breaking your game down into actions helps identify which ones may be the least entertaining to players, giving opportunity to address their design flaws. Often, those
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