Why devs need to fail fast, and how to do so | GI Sprint

gamesindustry.biz:

If your game isn't fun or feasible, kill it.

That's the advice of Free Lives' Dominique Gawlowski, Ant Workshop's Tony Gowland, and indie game developer and consultant Rami Ismail, who have banded together to share their experience on lowering game development costs for our new GI Sprint series of videos, podcasts, and articles about making games cheaper, faster, and better.

In this candid discussion about bringing game ideas to life (and knowing when it's time to kill them off), our panel emphasised that despite lower barriers to entry, increased costs, competition, and challenges mean game-making is harder than ever before.

With unprecedented job losses and studio closures, it's more crucial than ever to ensure your team doesn't waste time or money chasing projects that won't generate a return. Here's everything you need to know about failing fast and learning from every defeat.

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

When's the best time to abandon a game? Gawlowski's advice is succinct: "As soon as possible."

While it may be difficult to trust your gut when you're starting out, the panel universally agreed that you need to give yourself a hard and fast deadline – say, a month of prototyping time – after which you decide whether to commit to a project or move on.

"If it isn't fun to play for five minutes, then we're done. We move on to the next one. And that's still what I teach," Ismail says.

"That's still what I do when I make my own games. If we can't make it fun in a week, two weeks, then we're not sure there's something at the core, and it's time to move on."

Gowland agrees: "You need to have that hard and fast kind of cut-off. No, you can't just keep iterating on that. And you can't just keep throwing new things at it.

"Very much from the outset, we've set out with: 'This has to be something that we can make'. If no publishers are interested in it, we don't want to be in a situation where we've