What Hermes taught me about video game pre-productions
A Retrospective look at Hermes’ pre-production, and the importance of vision, experimentation and knowing your team
Preface
These past few months have been something of an emotional roller-coaster. October 2021 marked the start of my fifth and final year at Rubika — a video game, animation and industrial design school based in Northern France. In a couple of months’ time from now, all of us will be embarking on our respective journeys; some will continue their studies, others will seek to enter the job market, but all will move away from the familiarity of life at Rubika. Besides reminiscing on the good times, bad times, I’ve also found myself revisiting projects from the past five years, both for the nostalgic trip, as well as for the retrospective lessons they can provide on what made certain projects work, and others fail.
It’s been an enjoyable exercise, and an excuse to go digging through old notebooks, design documents, codebases, and asset libraries. I decided to make this an opportunity to take up writing again, and use it both as a continuation and launching point into a series of retrospectives on things that Rubika has taught me; from my first year to the current — and last — one.
Introduction
Hermes — my end-of-studies 5th year video game project — aims to put players in the shoes of a pioneering aviator in a fictional Mediterranean archipelago, where they must learn to master their aircraft, and transport crucial cargo to islands in danger of being destroyed by a mysterious Maelstrom. The project kicked-off in October, and is currently being developed by a team of 4 artists, 3 designers and 3 programmers. By the end of December, we were on our way to wrapping up our Pre-production, just as the winter break approached.
On paper, the three months produced less-than-impressive results : our prototype wasn’t fun, the plane’s controls didn’t feel right, we had over-scoped by a mile, and were unable to deliver on our promise of playing a half-flight simulator, half-resource management game. Despite this, I’d be willing to argue that our Pre-production had been an overall massive success.
Hermes taught me that a video game’s Pre-production is a major factor in determining the nature and quality of its overall development. To understand why, I’ll walk you through the 3 key takeaways I had after Hermes’ Pre-production, and why they were so important in securing the building blocks for a healthy Production.
1. Pre-productions are about defining Creative Vision
A video game, like many creative undertakings, often starts with a vision. A goal. Something to build towards. Clearly defining a game’s vision is wholly crucial to its subsequent development. The unfortunate reality is that defining a game vision isn’t as simple as it seems. During my time at Rubika, I’ve seen dozens of projects crash and burn because they neglected the importance of creative vision, and started Production without a stable foundation to build upon.
Vision is the tight bond that forms around all aspects of game development. Without a clear path to follow, Game Design takes on an arbitrary and confused nature : new game mechanics are added without the proper forethought. The repercussions of this is that Programmers find themselves stuck implementing features almost guaranteed be scraped once they inevitably don’t fit in. Artists follow suit : as creative vision rapidly shifts and changes on the fly, precious assets find themselves caught in the crossfire.
I’ve personally heard teams that worked on failing projects describe their Pre-productions as being “too random”, “sporadic ”, and lacking a “unifying global vision”. Members all seemed to work completely detached from one another. The work was being put in, but no one knew to what effect.
A lack of creative vision all but guarantees mayhem and collateral damage in all three branches of development, and this can lead to further damaging a team’s standing, leading us into the second point.
2. Pre-productions introduce you to your team
One of the things that our teachers, instructors and industry professionals have repeated to us over the years (and even more so for a project that concludes 5 years of studies) is that the most important aspect of teamwork is the team. You might have the best and brightest minds, but if your team is unable to function properly, communicate effectively or work cooperatively, then you aren’t going anywhere. In fact, I’d wager that you could diagnose a team with no creative vision as being dysfunctional, self-sabotaging and lacking in camaraderie and cooperative spirit.
I’ve seen this happen so many times over the course of my studies. It’s happened to me, it’s happened to friends, it’s happening to people around me right now, and it happens in the industry all the time. I’ve seen teams where no one wanted to bear the responsibility of bearing the mantle of leadership; teams where the person in charge wasn’t qualified, but no one dared to say otherwise; teams where creative vision was held hostage to never-ending internal conflicts; and the saddest, teams so discouraged by the state of their project that they would rather give up than try to fight a steep uphill battle.
In a failing team, members can find themselves drowning in a buildup of frustration and anger. Once again, this is something that I’ve seen and heard firsthand : the group begins to collapse because of deteriorating relations. Collaboration becomes impossible as people can’t bear the thought of working on a project that is on a clear path to nowhere.
Pre-productions are an opportunity to prevent this from happening during Production. When working on such large scale projects — one that could go on for a year or more, with people you’ll be seeing every day— it’s worth using the first couple of months to go beyond mere introductions and get to know one another, start figuring out how you can best work with each other, and if need be, develop a process for conflict mediation.
3. Pre-productions are a playground that allow for failure
Hermes’ style of Pre-production was a bit of a first for me. Up until 5th year, we would generally start our projects by diving straight into Production, and simply labelling the initial couple of weeks as “Pre-production”, without thinking too much about what that meant. For the first time, I was working in an environment where, for an entire three months, Creative Vision was allowed to flourish while we took the time to experiment and stress-test game mechanics, technologies, ideas, etc.
Hermes started Pre-production in October, and everyday we tested, scraped, restarted, validated ideas and practiced for Production. We went wrong more than we went right, but in the end it was for the better.
That’s when I realized what a Pre-production is supposed to be about : “ Pre-productions” are called “Pre-productions” because they give you a taste of what Production could be like.
Pre-productions are a safe environment in which you can simulate your incoming Production. Make the most of it !
Your Pre-production can be many things, but above all, it should be a testing ground. Hermes used its Pre-production to test the mettle of its members both technically and socially. We pushed the boundaries of the technologies we were using to see what their breaking points were, and— to a lesser degree — did the same on a human level : I know what I can ask of my teammates, and what they can ask of me. I know how to communicate with a particular person on a particular problem, and perhaps now we both know how to effectively communicate a solution. By the end of Pre-production, we had all become greater communicators in the context of our team.
For all of these reasons, even if much of what we developed during Pre-production is going to be scraped, I believe that we are starting Production on the right footing. We know where we are headed : we’ve matured with our project’s creative vision, and are proud of how far it has come; we are more comfortable with our development tools and their limits; and finally, we know each other more than when we started. As we will inevitably face greater challenges, our means of communication, camaraderie and goodwill (fingers crossed) are going to be the best shot we have at overcoming the odds.
Conclusion
So far, Hermes has already taught me much. During my first four years at Rubika, Pre-productions were a clumsy hybrid, where failure and experimentation were often less forgiving. 5th year was a paradigm shift : Hermes had ample time for its creative vision to blossom, there was an emphasis on team members getting comfortable with each other’s work habits, and trial and error were at the forefront of development efforts.
Looking back on our three months of Pre-production, I feel that I’ve learned a lot about the value of taking time to play with, break, understand, and repair things before you can truly begin to make them.
-H.
