Minimum Viable Content

A huge amount of my time working with games companies has been around scoping. It’s an essential thing to get right, but incredibly difficult, and almost always a moving target (budgets often change). I thought this week I would share some of my experiences and lessons learned, as I’m going through the process for Ten Pin Ghouling, my cursed bowling roguelike, and cover why short session, highly replayable games are so great for scope flexibility.

I have a lot of thoughts on this, so I’ll do my best to keep this short and high-level. If you want further info, then please reply to this email and I’ll get your message and answer your question if I can!

(Note, I’m talking about premium paid titles here)

There are two places that scoping is most crucial.

1. In the very early planning phases.

2. At the mid point during development.

The mid point has been covered pretty well at this point (descope don’t crunch!), so I’m going to focus on the early planning stages.

The Baseline

There will be a minimum amount of content that you need in order to offer decent value to players (and therefore look good to publishers). We can also use this information to calculate any problems with our initial pitch.

I will use Ten Pin Ghouling here as the use case, as I’ve recently been through this process, although the numbers here won’t reflect my actual development calculations, they’re just examples.

Let’s first make some informed assumptions. Data for these can be gathered by your own research (hltb is super useful for this). We need to know:

Good value for players looks like 2 hours of content for each $1 spent.

I want to sell a game for around $15

From this, we can very simply infer that we need to create a game that is 30 hours long. This rough baseline allows us to start planning the amount of content that we need.

Next, we look to our own game loop and systems. In TPG, a single completed run takes around 30 minutes, plus there is time at the start and end nosing around in menus, looking at lore related things, buying items and planning, so lets call it 40 minutes.

[30 × 60 minutes] = 1800 minutes
[1800 minutes / 40 runs] = 45 runs

I need enough content to make sure that the player doesn’t feel that they have ‘beaten’ the game for at least 45 runs. Not every player will keep playing to near this value, but value proposition is part of the sales pitch, not the game design (yet).

The Content

We know at a $15 price point for Ten Pin Ghouling we want to make sure that the player does at least 45 runs.

In short session, highly replayable games, the best way to do that is to offer new toys. In our case, this means new balls, lanes, score modifiers etc. Think of getting a new location, weapon or character in Vampire Survivors.

We could make players grind for content, which does inflate play time (looking at you rpgs), but I believe a key pillar of successful games these days is generosity. So let’s plan to give the player a new toy after almost every run.

This gives them a two clear reasons to keep playing - to try out their new toy and see how it impacts the game, and to unlock the next thing. These are probably the most compelling reasons people play video games, novelty and progression.

Why we need to know

We can now be confident that we’re offering value to players, but knowing everything above also lets us answer some essential questions. Can we make this game? Will anyone fund it?

This is really a question of time and money, but also team make-up, deadlines and skills.

At this point the maths gets complicated and hyper specific to your project and team, so everything here is very much an example.

By this point in development we should understand our systems well enough that we can roughly price them out (we should have made a prototype by now). In short session, high replay games (please suggest a shorthand for this, I can’t keep calling them that…) we have two main costs - the system itself (game loop, menus, saving, audio etc) and the content that populates the systems. Let’s use some oversimplified example numbers here that don’t reflect any real life project.

Core Systems - 6 months

New content toy - 1 week (x 45 = ~12 months)

Total Development time - 18 months

Monthly Dev cost - $6k

Total Budget - $130k (including 20% contingency)

If you’re self publishing, you might want to go further and work out sales figures to break even (about 12.5k units for this game). But at this point we now know what it takes for our core game loop idea to be turned into a full release, and can identify any key issues.

You’re most likely to spot issues here if the game simply looks too expensive, and your confidence in getting it funded is low. Your main option here is to either adjust the price point (which then flows down through these calculations into the final budget) or take a look at ways to adjust the game itself.

For example, if you need lots of content but it is very expensive to produce, because you’re having to create a lot of expensive artwork for each new thing (maybe a whole new level), maybe that game in particular isn’t great for your team right now, or maybe there is a cool tech solution you could use to prevent that issue?

I hope this has illustrated the kind of things to look for when planning your game from the early stages, how important understanding and refining your core loop is (it still has to be fun for the whole game!) and also why we see so many roguelikes these days!

If this was useful, please share it with your team or other developers in your network.

Thank you!