Actually after reading your essay it got clear to me, that we actually more or less practice the process you described, but we never thought much about it or planned it like that from the beginning. It just evolved into that kind of game design process.

After sitting back and having realized how game design works at our company I thought about what I missed the most in this makeshift design process. I also noted some problems that emerged at our company during several projects due to a lack of an (experienced, dedicated) game designer. So to supplement the section “The risks of not having a game designer”:

1. nobody on the team actually has the vision and lives (i.e. visually and vocally communicates) it to fill in the missing, magic parts in the written game design doc. So the result can be a lack of game design vision, clear visual, aureal and game play goals and their final quality; and last but not least: team motivation;

2. if the mentioned crisis managment doesn’t run optimally and you try to use a too ambitious and/or just inexperienced (part-time/makeshift) game designer you may force the leads and production to strip down the design doc to a feasible (but maybe mediocre) design or come up with pragmatic ad-hoc solutions to have at least some progress when design details are still missing, incomplete, fuzzy or just infeasible;

3. we didn’t take the time during two project’s pre-productions to create a proof-of-concept of the initial game design (which admittedly was kind of too ambitious in one case and incomplete in the other) and the game design was finalized so late in both projects, that actually almost everything was done ad-hoc and just too iteratively (and thus cost time & money).

I think what helped our company to survive so far is the same “magic” many other (small) game companies work with: ambitious, hard-working team members compensating lacking structure, game design and lots of technical and other problems during endless overhours. An old curse of game production (or technical productions in general?) I desperately want to overcome one day.

Gambatte! :P

Boris

I guess this is what you get for trying to edumacate us heathens.

Perhaps I should have added that these are your options in development: on the publishing side there are other things you can do, yes.

And “Panic” is always an option.

How about “release derivative crap” and spend all your budget on marketing?

A1: License IP, spend money on box art, ship at Christmas, refuse returns.

A2: Hire Jurie.