> This is an approach that is sometimes taken when planning game projects, that you design your production plan so that as many parts of the game as possible are made in parallel, and then it all gets put together near the end of the development timeline, hopefully with enough time to fix bugs, balance gameplay, and add polish.
I feel like all AAA games are developed this way: Not playable till very late. Thats why they generally suck.
While a normal board meeting style development, i feel completely bamboozled by this approach. Indie games in contrast usually start with an MVP, a Minimum Viable Product, to test the basic concept. Then make the basic game loop fun. Then do the rest of the game like maps, sound, graphics, to support the central idea.
AAA do all the graphics and maps and sound and AI first, somehow merge it together and just hope that it will be a "good" game, that it will be fun. Even if there is internal QA or playtesting, feedback gets consequently ignored.
And people still preorder.
As someone with both AAA and game jam experience, you just put my vague misgiving about the AAA process right into words. This is exactly it.
At least my game jam teams have always focused on what the core game loop is first, built that, then iterated, and my AAA teams have always tried more of an assembly-line approach where there's no game at all until everyone's already feeling the pressure. Because supposedly it's more efficient to pre-plan everything and just trust that it all comes together perfectly (art, level design, system design, engineering, sound, etc) first try rather than leaving time to iterate.
Which kind of makes sense when much of generic management takes its cues from automotive manufacturing (assembly lines, Kanban, etc).
Interesting in the context of BGIII and its extended early access. I had to stop playing after a play through or two of EA because i wanted the game to still feel fresh when the entire game came out.
> AAA do all the graphics and maps and sound and AI first, somehow merge it together and just hope that it will be a "good" game, that it will be fun. Even if there is internal QA or playtesting, feedback gets consequently ignored.
Is that actually true? Have you worked on AAA games or got this information from credible sources?
As far as I've seen the process, MVPs and play testing is a concrete phase even in AAA development, usually for each major gameplay feature, where they're tested with minimal graphics (sometimes just blocks/boxes) but still in isolation from everything else.
But, this is just gathered from the few times I've seen the process from the outside, I haven't personally worked on any AAA games.