Making Your First Game: Minimum Viable Product - Scope Small, Start Right - Extra Credits

When you're making your first game, we've told you to start small, but that may leave you wondering: just how small should you be planning for? This brings us to the concept of minimum viable product: figuring out exactly which features your game needs to be fun.

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♪ Intro Music: "Penguin Cap" by CarboHydroM

♪ Outro Music: "Translyvania Sound Machine" by Stemage, Chunkstyle

[athena]

"It needs to be fun before it looks cool"

-Bungie 2002

[futuza]

As a developer, this is really good advice. You need to figure out if your core mechanics are interesting on their own without all the fluff. If they aren't you need a new idea.

[OriJ]

So when i call someone an MVP i am actually calling them a Minimum Viable Product?

[arc]

so you have to stop cutting sometime, so how do we determin-
*video starts loading*
my internet is bad at being stable but it knows when to cut

[Jvep]

Strange how a game designer's ambition can be their greatest asset or their greatest downfall. I've had this happen to me a lot in college; where my scope was just way too big.

[arvideriksson]

Minimum viable product? it's like the motto of EA

[georgewest]

Remove the 'Viable' And it's EA's business model.

[NintendoWizard]

this actually is great advice for ANYTHING, im an artist and i could actually use most these advise when drawing or writing (looking at it from a broad perspective), and thats worth a thumbs up for the video

[caramida]

Cool Stuff... so for a platformer I'll just need a dot moving and jumping across a surface... then I'm good to start...

[extrahistory]

Figured out what your first game project will be? Here's how to make it manageable! #ExtraCredits

[DarthRadical]

I will say - menu-based combat CAN be engaging. Pokemon has proved that. So - a menu based combat with an engaging rock-paper-scissors system (Pokemon elements are really just a far more complex version of that at their core) can be engaging due to the inherent tactical choices.

[youtubeuniversity]

MVP for my game: Tic-Tac-Toe but you can take an opponent's spot by winning a coin flip. Very simple.

[EagleGamer]

Thank, really needed this. I have a tendency to over-complicate things in my head, and not only do I make game designs WAY too complicated for my skill level, but after the last couple episodes I even made making a minimum viable product more complicated than it needed to be XD Thanks EC!

[vampbat]

Those HM01 jokes are greatly appreciated. Thank you for this good advice. I'm trying to get a prototype of this game DONE asap so I don't waste time from the start!
*Edit 8 months on:* I finished my prototype! Got hung up on what I didn't know that I didn't know. 😎 After I figured out collision areas better, and started looking into signals for smarter/less buggy coding, things clicked and I finished my project in less than a month. Now I get the fundamentals, since I didn't *know* what to ask the internet for help on!

[ViniciusC]

Basicaly, pretend you are creating a game for Atari?

[Scarletraven]

5:54
<Please RTS come out early>
<12th placed: RTS>
<Whaaat? Ok I'll just do a simple adventure game>
<And we're leaving out adventure games>
<Seriously? I'll just do a multiplayer timed puzzle or something>
<I'd also recommend avoiding multiplayer entirely>
<REALLY?>

[Dunoid]

All I see in the comments:

"waah you bashed Totalbiscuit or something"

"waah you don't like GamerGate"

I'm here for intelligent conversation about game development, not your internet hate-machine gossip.  Keep that shit on Twitter.

[AnthanKrufix]

Fighting Game being listed as on the upper end of difficulty to make a fun and engaging Minimum Viable Product.
Divekick's all like "screw that lol!"

[darrenho]

This makes a lot of sense even if it's not your first game. Before you start building your game and wasting a lot of time and resource into content on something you think might work, build a minimum viable product first to get an idea how the game will work and whether it's even good in the first place, heck you'll likely even get more ideas better than what you had before to put into your game. As mentioned in the video even if it is a big AAA budget game, having a minimum viable product first will help you realize the potential of the core gameplay mechanics and if say it doesn't work then it most likely would not have worked and you just saved yourself a lot of time and resource from trying to make content for it. However just because it doesn't work doesn't mean it's over, it just means there's something wrong or something not good enough that you need to change/improve and it can even make you realize potential problems with the game that you can avoid or change when developing it (remember the fail faster video and how learning the problems (or the potential of it) and mistakes of your game can help you make a better game).

[Thenextworldwar]

So basically, the designer(s) need to figure out what the absolute core of the game is, and figure out if those elements work well and are enjoyable?


So, a game like Steel Battalion (one of the few mech combat games I really enjoy) would have an MVP that consists of:


- The movement mechanics
- A flat, empty square of terrain
- A basic weapon
- An enemy to shoot (Who could be an enormous cube for all it matters)


Testing the movement and basic combat. It needs to feel good to drive the VT and fight in it. 99% of the game can be boiled down to these elements. If these elements sucked, Steel Battalion would be awful, no matter what else it had.


Do I have the concept?