Iterative prototyping with Charlie Cleveland - GD Podcast episode 33
In the latest episode of the Game Developer podcast (recorded at GDC Showcase, with our sibling organization GDC), we chatted with Charlie Cleveland, game director and CEO at Moonbreaker developer Unknown Worlds Entertainment, as well as the creator of Subnautica. We got very excited together about the power of collaboration tool Miro, the excitement of crunchy systems design and the nuances of random numbers, and the crucial importance of rapid prototyping and iterative design, even if the initial results aren't pretty.
Music by Mike Meehan.
Listen now on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, and Spotify.
Rapid prototyping is crucial to Unknown Worlds' process, as Cleveland is bullish on making something "terrible" for the sake of starting the creative cycle of building and iterating.
"If we just had to play something this Friday, like how, how could we do that?" Cleveland says, detailing his and his team's approach. As long as everyone is on board and knows that things will look rough, it's ok!
"So you just come up with something terrible…you'll just play it for half an hour, maybe 15 minutes, but it's a sketch. You're learning something extremely important. So you just basically have to lower the quality bar and you have to just tell people whatever it is, it's gonna be crap. Don't worry: you're not trying to make something great!
"You're just trying to make something and by making something and making it crappy, you now get this momentum, this incredible momentum because you're not working on architect systems or designs that are totally nebulous and in the future and unknowable, you're actually working with a game that you're all playing. It's available to iterate on immediately."
We also had a go at randomness for designers
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