A belated greetings from Grant Midwinter
Hello everyone. First and foremost, apologies for the distinct lack of updates from the Grant Midwinter camp since we got the good news. While I’d like to say that we’ve been on a 2 month celebratory bender, the reality has been far less glamorous.
We approached the pitch with some fairly grand ideas for Rough Diamond, and putting together a gameplay mechanism that will do justice to our vision has been our main consideration since getting the green light from the powers-that-be.
This is our first stab at a game of this scale, and I’m glad we didn’t make any assumptions about how straightforward building a game from the ground-up actually would be!
Perhaps an analogy will help to explain what making a basic game engine entails: Imagine yourself at home with friends, when someone has the grand idea of playing a board game. Great! Except that, after searching high and low, you can’t find one anywhere. ‘Nevermind,’ you think, ‘We’ll just make one up’.
As a group, you cast your minds back to every positive gameplay experience you’ve ever had, lifting out the best mechanisms from each individual title; part X from Monopoly, component Y from Connect 4 etc. You cobble together your hybrid and begin playing, stopping frequently to change certain rules and reaffirm others. Finally, after many false starts, you complete an entire game.
It probably won’t be of much surprise to you to learn that this first playthrough will NOT be fun. On top of that, the considerations that you make while playing will potentially be completely different to those that you originally set out to achieve. In short – this is not the game you set out to create.
So you sit back and consider what you can hone, tweak or cut loose before giving it another go. Maybe you’ll be lucky and strike gold with this version. We didn’t.
During the development process, which is still far from over, we have toyed with, and eventually abandoned, around six very different gameplay mechanics – before finally, hopefully, cracking it with our seventh. At some point or other, each one one of the previous six incarnations had felt like ‘the one’ – and it can be heartbreaking when you realise that the idea you pinned such great hopes on crumbles at the seams when given ruthless testing.
If this design process has taught me anything, it’s to not be precious. Gameplay is absolutely paramount, and we have a huge graveyard of discarded Post-it notes, home made currency and hand-drawn boards on the office floor that prove that we’ve paid our dues in this respect!
As gutting as discarding one of your ‘babies’ is, being willing to hack off any dead limbs has been a vital part of Rough Diamond’s development thus far, and every step has brought us closer to the game we always set out to make – with gameplay at its absolute heart.
Much love
Jim
