Plasma Ring

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Plasma Ring @ring12/3/2022, 10:06 AM

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Leena @Leena11/14/2022, 9:31 AM

Noun-verb diagrams

Here's our noun-verb diagram for Dead Static Drive's core gameplay loop:

Making a noun-verb diagram to explain at a glance "what could interact with what" was a huge turning point for us in terms of documentation (among other things!) and I thought I'd share it in case anyone found it useful. (I'll add a tip in the replies if you're going to give this a go)

I find this far more useful than a "bible" explaining all this over multiple pages before going in a drawer never to be read again.

We have copies of this laminated in the studio as well, and I like to draw on it with whiteboard marker and do little player scenarios to test things out before putting them in flowcharts and blueprints.

It's been useful for finding holes and questioning assumptions we were making about player motivations, and is super handy for pitching at a glance, people can understand the game so much faster with this than a bunch of bloated copy.

#deadstaticdrive #gamedev #gamedesign #narrativedesign #devstaticdrive #indiedev

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in reply to @Leena's post:

Leena @Leena11/14/2022, 9:31 AM

(A tip if you're going to give this a go: something that came up when we were doing this work was differentiating between what we ended up calling the "possibility space" and the core behaviour.

***This diagram is not supposed to chart all the things that are possible, but the things you feel are important. ***

Finding where that distinction was and being disciplined about it was a crucial part of the work.

You could really get in the weeds in a game like ours with all the things that are possible, and it's important to know where that line is.

Try and keep it for core behaviour that the player needs to do throughout the game, not just "can pick up stick, can wave it, can stick it in tailpipe" that kind of thing. Otherwise it becomes too overwhelming! Identify the line early and it is much easier to do)

ari @roxaloxa11/14/2022, 2:06 PM

can vouch, i ended up doing this as part of a rework of one of our core loops (after seeing leena share it on twitter) and it really helped a lot. the biggest way it helped immediately was identifying which things actually connected to each other and if you're relying too much (or too little!) on any given noun