Notes from the Inaugural Game Preproduction Class: Draft Macro Documents and Charts

My three teams presented drafts of their game macro documents and macro charts today. I am glad that I devoted a day to this. Each team made reasonable progress on the documents, and our discussion highlighted places for them to improve.

One of the groups had shown a draft macro chart earlier in the semester, and they had a lot of ideas contained in each row, essentially one level per row. I advised them to break these down into gameplay beats or player experience beats. The one that this team showed today had much better decomposition of ideas. I am grateful that they showed that early draft since it meant that the whole team could see how much better the newer version was.

I asked the students to compare the macro document and the macro chart and whether one of them drove the other. The one respondent mention that he felt that the two complemented each other, that they worked together. My inclination is to think he is right, and I presume the rest of the class felt the same way despite not speaking up. I still have no personal experience with macro charts, and I'm torn between those and one-page design documents for potential exploration in my personal work.

One of the teams covered their title screen as being part of the macro chart, but an aspect that all of them missed was the concept of fail states. That is, all of them treated their draft of the macro chart as a "happy path story." I urged them to also think about what happens with the player loses or fails so that they do not miss requirements in the draft schedule, which is due at our next meeting. The students pointed out that Lemarchand does not address death or failure in his macro chart, and so they weren't sure how to do it. I suggested that simply breaking down the chart into headings, like "Narrative Path" and "Fail States" might do it. I will be interested to see how they decide to handle these cases.

Another fruitful conversation arose around the linking between rows. In a few cases, students talked about how there was a narrative connection between chronological experiences, but these were not represented in the chart. This was a good opportunity to point out that this is what the chart was actually for: to express these linkages clearly at the macro level. This dovetailed into a good though short discussion of macro vs micro design, and also to one student's frustration at not feeling confident in making design decisions. Once again, this discussion pulled into the value of these charts: that the chart makes you face these decisions, and it's a low-stakes way to figure out your scope before you even start worrying about scheduling the production of individual assets.