What is Workflow?
Work•flow /ˈwərkflō/
“The sequence of industrial, administrative, or other processes through which a piece of work passes from initiation to completion.” – lexico.com
What is a quality workflow? How do we develop it? Below are elements of the production cycle that most creative people move through as they create something. First, we must identify the stages of project production. What is each stage and what are the quality checks for each stage. Read on and find out!
Stages of Creation Development
Inspiration
How do we find ideas to develop?
Inspiration can be found anywhere. You can be inspired from the games you play, the environment you live in, and the events that occur around you. There isn’t necessarily a process to becoming inspired, but a good habit to get into is to try something new whenever you feel low on ideas. If you’re absolutely starved of creativity, try an activity you haven’t done in a while. Take a bike ride, go on a walk, play the game that’s been sitting unopened in your Steam library for 3 years, anything that changes the usual routine.
Quality is measured accurately by our peers and biased towards ourselves. Whether that bias be negative or positive, it is still an unfair judgement.
Intention
How do we clarify our specific goal(s) for a project?
Knowing the intention of a game is key to having a smooth production. You need to focus on getting the bare minimum finished as soon as possible, and in order to accomplish that you need to identify what your game wants to do. You can do this by studying the core of what makes popular games playable. Mario is fun because man get to end and win. That statement identifies that you need a character, a goal, and an obstacle, the three things you need for a playable game, which is what you should be aiming for in making goals.
Pre-production
How can we brainwrite, brainstorm, storyboard, and plan our ideas at this phase?
After you identify each team member’s roles, you create a group on an organization website, and each member writes in tasks that they feel are important to the final product of the game. After this, get together and delete the least important ones or ones that are outside the range of skill/time available. After this, you estimate how much time each task will take and plan on what each person will work on first accordingly.
Production
How do we communicate with each other and execute our plan for this phase? This is where we actually make the project.
Remember when we identified each persons roles? Scrap it. Everyone’s a coder now. Everyone helps code the minimum viable product, a.k.a. the very first point in which the project could be considered a ‘game’. If your game is a platformer, all you need is a cube that can move and maybe jump. No assets, no sounds, nothing fancy. After this crucial point is completed, you are allowed to break off into your established roles and complete tasks.
Post-production
How do we communicate with each other and execute our final stages of the project for this phase? This is where we publish the project.
In the final stages of production the most important task is to MAKE SURE YOU CAN EXPORT A WORKING BUILD. Every single thing you built or developed would be wasted if someone flubs up and exports a build that has a broken camera or a piece of code missing that has the player move. Perfectionism is easy to achieve at this stage and is important to establish in trying to export a complete presentation of what your group has been working on for the past development cycle.
Presentation/Performance
How do we share our project with our learning community, advisory members, and the world?
Practice your presentation. Know what you are going to say before you say it, and have evidence that you can show with screenshots so that the advisory committee knows you mean business. Your presentation would be boiled down to a greeting, an explanation/pitch of your game, each team member explaining their role with proof, and a thanks to the viewers of the presentation.
Feedback
How do we conduct a feedback session at the end of the project development cycle?
Take all feedback to heart. if someone says your game plays slow, it plays slow. There is no useless feedback that can be given by anyone. If you are given positive feedback, keep in mind what it was that made them feel that way. If they compliment the smooth gameplay, keep the movement scripts in mind or future games, or even improve on it further any way you can.