Elements of game design, part five: Planning and Concepting

Here is another instalment in the Elements of game design series of blogs.

 As with most things in life, Planning and preparation is everything; And designing a game needs to be planned and prepared before any production can begin. I’ve stated before that it starts with an idea or concept, which then gets discussed, developed and changed many times before any type of concepting or artwork for the game can be produced.

Concept art develop for Syndra, A character in the game League of Legends - Riot Games

The planning and concepting stage for most industries and businesses be it games, movies, books, TV shows etc, I think is the most important stage because it entails what the whole idea, game, movie, etc will be about, how it looks and how it plays. It gives everyone a clear idea of what everyone’s job is, what it is they need to produce and what the project is about.  

In game development, Artists either in house (if the company is large) or freelance are hired to produce a whole lot of thumbnails, initial sketches and designs for the environments, characters, all for the purpose of making production and helping 3D artists visualize the game and then create them quickly, without even thinking out it too much.

Everything will be a lot easier since the designs have already been produced and plans have been laid out so everyone can just get on with their jobs without being lost. It’s also a lot cheaper to concept out lots of designs rather than to produce them out of nothing halfway through production, as it wastes a lot of time and the production chain would be halted. 

Final Design Concept for Syndra

For example if there weren’t any designs for the 3D artists to base their models of off, they would take a considerable amount of time trying to make the 3D models just from their head, or use crude reference from the internet, which would waste a whole lot of time, and in the end produce very poor and inefficient results. Compare that to if they did have great concepts and drawings from concept artists the 3D artists would know exactly what to model and wouldn’t waste any time.

If a game is poorly planned it may cost the company millions if it’s a big budget game, as they say, time is money, and in the games industry it can be the difference between a company going bust or being incredibly successful.

One example is Blizzard Entertainment.

With the huge success of Blizzard Entertainment’s World of Warcraft, they started working on a new MMO codenamed, “Titan” in 2009-2010 and with that came a whole load of planning and concepting, Although they had to push their “reset button” for an unknown reason in May 2013. The team of about 100 developers had been cut down to just 30 developers, and Planning and Concepting started again.

 The President of the company Mike Morhaime stated that the company is in the process of selecting a new direction for the project, and re-envisioning what they want the game to be. Blizzard are known to have gone through this iterative process with their previous titles such as Starcraft 2 and WoW.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=b_wKb9Wv5XQ‎

It goes to show even for a huge company like Blizzard, planning is crucial, they have essentially lost a lot of money and man hours making a game which they have to reset, probably due to it not being up to company standard

http://venturebeat.com/2013/05/28/blizzard-delays-unannounced-mmo-until-2016-resets-whole-project-exclusive/

Thief Concept Art

Last year we had a few projects that required planning and concepting such as the reef character project, where we had to create a human character which lives and thrives on the reef, I had to go through the planning and concepting processes as usual

References -> Moodboards -> Initial Idea’s -> Thumbnails -> Developed concepts -> Final Design.

Without any of the moodboards, research or initial idea’s I would have been lost, As I didn’t really have a wide knowledge of what lives on the reef,  so I had to plan and research, then look at reference before I could start concepting, developing any of my designs and finalising them.

Although I knew I could have kept on going on and developed my Final Design even more, going through more iterations and perfecting my design. There’s always more you can add, or do, to everything.

I personally think Planning is a bit more important than concepting, because planning is what you do before you actually start to concept, Planning is creating the initial idea. It also includes hiring different people/studios for different jobs, the scheduling, how everything is going to work and what everyone is going to do, Without planning, there is no real goal for concepting because there aren’t any idea’s