Iterative Design Process is essentially when you take an idea, or multiple ideas and set them as a foundation to build upon. As a game designer, we would be taking multiple ideas and creating prototypes based on those ideas, we would then build upon those ideas and see what works best, what looks like our vision and what works well. If an idea we have doesn’t fit in to our vision, we can simply abandon it. Iterative Design can be a cost-effective approach as it puts user experience in the center of the design process.
Iterative Design has four main stages and they are Prototype, Playtest, Iterate and Implement.
Prototyping is where you make a basic playable version of your idea and see how and whether or not it actually it works. As previously mentioned its best to have multiple ideas incase the first one doesn’t quite work out.
Playtesting, this is essentially what it says on the tin, we’ve got a prototype and now we need to test it. To do this we simply play the game. During this stage its ideal to get feedback from family and friends and use their collective feedback to see what works and what doesn’t. Why didn’t this idea work, what was fun about this idea, was it easy to play etc..
Iterate. Now that we’ve got some feedback from our playtesting session, in this stage we focus on building on that feedback and using it to improve our game. Essentially this will loop us back to a prototype stage where we would make some of the changes suggested by the feedback received. Once they have been made, we would go back to a Playtest and then iterate again based on the feedback.
Eventually we’ll get to the Implement stage. The Implement stage is where we take our game and release it to a wider audience. However, this doesn’t mean our game is complete, there will be feedback from the wider audience which is different from that to the friends and family feedback. Using that feed back we go back and iterate.
For me Iteration is nothing new, as a former music producer and graphic designer, there was always things to change whether it be a time signature, tempo, colours in a certain graphic, keys, shapes, it was all about getting feedback and using it to improve the product.
Up to now, I have used an Iterative Design Process for Qubitz! which is my game on the Play Store. This allows me to continuously improve on what I have made. As an example, before publishing on the Play Store, I made a closed testing track and shared it with family and friends who have Android devices. They then told me what they liked and didn’t like about it so I had to find a balance, most of the changes were how the game mechanics worked.
After that I then shared my game to Reddit and got some constructive criticism and am now using that for my next update. I am also reaching out to multiple mobile game focused websites to try and get a feature and some feedback from those guys aswell.
JORDAN | GLITCH ARCADE 