Helen Frankenthaler:
"A really good picture looks as if it's happened at once. It's an immediate image. For my own work, when a picture looks labored and overworked, and you can read in it—well, she did this and then she did that, and then she did that—there is something in it that has not got to do with beautiful art to me. And I usually throw these out, though I think very often it takes ten of those over-labored efforts to produce one really beautiful wrist motion that is synchronized with your head and heart, and you have it, and therefore it looks as if it were born in a minute." (In Barbara Rose, Frankenthaler (New York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc. 1975, p. 85)
As game developers it takes us months and often years of labour to make one game, how can we possibly be spontaneous, exciting, innovative and explore ideas?
To my mind, with all of our technology and software developments, if we can't find a way of developing interactive entertainment faster...we're never going to have the confidence to explore ideas, take a risk on something new and therefore the industry will stagnate. I believe this is and has already happened to the games making process to an extent. (Although I don't believe that the games industry will ever totally stagnate.)
There are inumerable ideas to explore and yet we're holding back, not because we can't realise them but because it takes so much time and effort to realise them with the current production methods. There is a fear in taking risks on new ideas because if they fail too much money is lost. And rightly so! We all have to pay bills. However at the same time we should be trying to reach beyond ourselves at the same time.
Small teams versus large teams
Small games are easier to innovate in. They involve smaller tight knit teams that are more flexible. However in the current marketplace they are very difficult to make a profit from.
Larger games are easier to make profits from however they are harder to innovate in as the teams are larger and lose their flexibility.
I think there should always be thorough pre-development. I just don't know how much and how it should be funded.
Multiple pre-development teams
Perhaps one solution is to have have multiple larger $3-8million games in pre-development. It would be assumed that multiple pre-developments would fail however the tech, ideas, skills and teams would still grow and the games that do make it through to development would be stronger, better developed and better received as a result.
That's enough rambling for today.
I've been doing lots of pre-development for abstract.No1 and its already formed into an idea. More on this next time.
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