Blog Post Number 4 - Might be a little shorter than previous entries, but here we go anyway.
Basically in Tuesday's lecture we learnt what it means to iterate ideas and had a go at doing it ourselves. Iterating an idea is basically where you take your idea and make one change to it to try and improve it, test that idea with independent persons and see how it pays off - if they like it and think it works then the idea is kept, if not it is discarded as useless. Regardless, this process continues until your idea is full of changes that work towards making it a better game.
The most crucial thing to remember is that when iterating is the fact that you must change only one thing! While this may seem inefficient and you may think 'Surely I can iterate quicker if I do several things at once' this is not the case, the reason why is that if you implement 2 changes at the same time and then have them tested to see how they work you can't tell which of the changes it is that is making your idea better or worse. If you change just one idea at a time you know that it is definitely that one change that is helping or hindering your idea and not a combination of two things that on their own may be both helpful and a hinderance.
Iterating is a very useful process, it helps you to develop your ideas (sometimes at the expense of 'killing your babies') and wean out the good and the bad to make your idea as good as it can possibly be. In all fairness, iterating is one of the best and safest way to think of ideas and test them before they are taken too far into development - you don't want to make half a game only to be told that one 'tiny' thing ruins it that you should've removed earlier on in the thinking process.
Anyway, with iterating in mind we iterated our 15 minute board games - we roughly did 2-3 iterations in the time we had left and from doing so I already feel that my game has been vastly improved and had aspects removed that didn't work well. At the same time, I also feel that I helped to improve others' games by telling them how well their iterations have worked - it's a shared process of design that helps us to help each other be the best that we can be. Iteration is also a very quick process and can be done in very little time, which helps get through various ideas very quickly.
Anyway, that's all for this post on my thoughts about iteration, 'til next time - that's all folks!
yes the speed of iteration at the start of the development process is very quick, that is why it can be used to think very creatively and riskily about what you might do to change aspects of the game. As more of the development becomes fixed, this ability goes.
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