where to begin?

Over the weekend I started hacking up the framework to my new Unity project, which is always a fun place to be.  I’ve built the core to many game systems, and the early days are full of possibilities.  You get to test out new patterns, research the latest tech, and finally make some decisions that will inevitably cause endless pain to your future self.

Of course, since the whole impetus to starting this project was the desire to jump off the procedural deep end, that’s where I wanted to start.  My initial plan was to start prototyping level generators, and once I had something that could provide the world’s terrain I would use it as the basis for everything else that will live in that world — environments, characters, narrative, etc.

It didn’t take long to realize this was an awful plan.

What are the rules that define my world?  What are the constraints?  Without knowing this (in extreme detail), my generator could create literally anything and I would have no way of evaluating the output.

There’s really just one question I had to ask myself: WWND?  (What would Nintendo do?)

Developers at Nintendo often talk about their process of grey-boxing a small environment and prototyping character and camera controls until they are perfect.  *PERFECT*  They will spend months and months doing this sort of R&D until they get it to the point where they can hand someone a controller, step back, and watch them squeal with delight just from moving around this little virtual room, with no instructions needed.

Once all of that hard stuff is out of the way, the rest is easy.  Slap some Mario skins on that shit and send it over to design.  Done and done.

An interview from 1996 recently surfaced with Shigeru Miyamoto and his team discussing the development of Mario 64, where they describe this process plus all sorts of other great dev insights.  After reading that, plus watching some Extra Credits design videos, then reading Kotaku’s exposé on the failures in Star Citizen’s development for some lessons on what NOT to do, it became clear that I had to start with the basics.

This means all of the fun procedural stuff will have to wait, probably for quite a long time.  Once I have clearly defined the rules of my world, and the role of the player in that world, then I can open up the sandbox.