[MUSIC] In this video we're gonna talk about
priorities and how we decide what feature comes next.
And usually, I start with the player movement,
the player input when I make a game.
And we've done that, we've got our player moving around.
And we often look at our game at this point and say, so what next?
And the what next for us,
well, there's a way to go about that process to figure it out.
And I just wanted to show you the process that I go through
when I'm figuring out what feature I should implement next into the game.
First, jump over a couple of slides here.
Here are our feature areas that we've got for
our game that we've identified we'd like to create.
We've got our Player Movement, left, right, up, down.
We've got our Player Shooting, Player Health, Enemy Movement.
And we need to Spawn Enemy Waves as well.
They need to be multiple waves.
They need to do path finding.
They need to do go along an interesting particular path following waypoints.
And we need to have Enemy Health so that the enemies can die and
also the player can die.
So they are the core feature areas.
We also have some secondary features that we've identified, have a Score and
to also have Enemy Shooting.
If our game didn't have those two things, it would still be playable and
still be good fun.
Whereas, with the core, if we did not have an aspect of the core.
If the player did not have health,
then you sort of just play forever with no consequences, so we need to have these.
These are the nice to haves.
And because I have made this game design pretty tight,
we don't have a lot of secondary features.
You might have another 2 or 3, or
50 secondary features you want to put into a game, which is cool.
And then on top of that,
we're going to have a Polish to make our game more playable and more interesting.
We'll need Visual Effects, particle effects and explosions.
Sound Effects and Menus and Screens, so
people can navigate from the start menu and when they die, what do they do?
Restarting, etc.
And also the Content, so putting in a bunch of enemies and enemy speed and
how fast they shoot and how fast they respawn, etc.
And general tuning of our game.
So here is the big bucket of feature areas, each of these,
I would call a bucket.
Player Movement is a bucket, Enemy Health is a bucket.
So what do we do next?
Well, we've already done player movement, we know that.
And if we look at it,
we can eliminate the secondary features as the very next thing we do.
Cuz we don't want to be diving into secondary until we've done
most of our core.
And also, we don't need any polish just yet.
That'll be a little bit of overinvestment in making our game pretty,
you've got to actually have a game first before you go down that path, I believe.
Okay, we could also eliminate Player Health and
Enemy Health cuz we don't have a way of damaging them yet.
Until I can shoot there's no way for
me to be testing out my health and testing to make sure it works.
So you have to have a way to do damage before you register the damage.
That's our logic there.
So we're left with these four, sorry,
these three because we've already done Player Movement.
Player Shooting, Enemy Movement, and Spawning multiple enemy waves.
Spawning multiple enemy waves is a little bit more complex than just straight
up movement.
But these two are so intertwined in terms of where we spawn them, and
the path that they're spawning on.
So there's a lot there, and this is going to be reasonably technical.
So for me, looking at that one, these should really be grouped together.
This Player Shooting is pretty much grouped with the Player Movement.
So it makes sense next to do the Player Shooting, and
that would be the next feature that we work on.
So that's the flow that I go through in terms of figuring out what next.
And after we do Player Shooting, I'll go through the same process.
And it will most likely be these two that I've already identified, saying, well,
we should really get the enemies moving around now.
And the enemy spawning in a meaningful way.
And then after that we can go on to giving the player some health and
the enemy some health so we can hurt each other and have some sort of interaction.
And then once we've done that, we'll have our MVP,
we'll have a game that you can actually win and lose and play through.
Then we can add our secondary features.
And possibly at the same time, adding in our polish as we go along.
Now, one thing I'll say is that,
I do like from time to time grabbing one of these polished elements.
Maybe some particle effects or a little bit of sound effects and
putting them in earlier on.
So our game's feeling polished as we go.
And that's why in the very start of our game we put it in the background so
it looks a little bit pretty.
We're looking at something nice as we go along.
It's not just a blank screen.
If that wasn't there, we just have this.
And our game wouldn't feel like a game yet, right?
So that's why I like to put a little bit of polish in each step of the process.
Okay, so no challenge in this video except to say we're doing Player Shooting next.
And if you don't have any projectiles, now is the time to find projectiles.
I've given to you in the assets using my assets, but no other challenge.
I'm just giving you a clear window on the thought process for how we go about.
For figuring out what we work on next.
So let's jump in and work on Player Shooting.