Designing in the Dark

Why it's harder to fix 1 bad prototype than it is to make 10 prototypes and pick 1 good one.

In a video titled Heat Signature Devlog: Designing in the Dark, Tom Francis (creator of Gunpoint, Heat Signature, and Tactical Breach Wizards) gives an alarmingly accurate description of game design.

He says that building your game is like being in a dark cave.

In order to see, you must build a fire, but building this fire is arduous. You fumble around in the dark for a while getting your materials ready. Finally, a bright spark hits the kindling and quickly grows into a large illuminating flame. Now you have a playable prototype. Everything is visible. Navigating the lit room is trivial.

Now you need to build fires in other rooms. You go through the entire process again building new fires. Sometimes you build fires in silly places, like next to walls. Sometimes you can’t build fires where you want. Sometimes you build a fire, realize it doesn’t work there, and you’re forced to put it out and rebuild in another location.

“It’s incredibly difficult to be right about long term future plans… You can’t know what’s going to happen down the line… but as soon as you have done it, all of the wisdom and things that you’ve gained are just absolutely elementary.” - Tom Francis

This analogy explains perfectly why designing games is so difficult. I’ve experienced this exact problem in my gamedev journey.

I’ve been working on my indie game, Demonlocke, for nearly a year and a half now and despite all my work, I still have a long road ahead of me.

I’ve built, put out, and rebuilt a lot of fires. I’m getting close to being able to navigate this design space, but many of my initial fires were in bad locations and it is costing me.

This has led me to the conclusion that:

Fixing 1 bad prototype is harder than making 10 prototypes and picking 1 good one.

For my next project, I’ll make sure the initial prototype sings from the start. I’ll chose a prototype where all the important fires are well placed and don’t need to be moved around.

Thanks for reading,
Ben

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