How to See Our Vision (A Bit More) Clearly

Spelling it out for people can be tricky!

Every game studio ever made has had a vision in one way or another. For example:

• Making high quality, narrative-focused games that give players an emotional experience.
• Making incredibly detailed experiences that transport players into fully realized, open story-worlds.
• Making a sandbox game that gives players ultimate freedom and creativity to explore.

There are studios that excel at fulfilling their vision. But what some people might not realize— all that always starts from the one seed of an idea.

Asking The Right Questions

Let’s work with them metaphor here to figure. The question we have to ask ourselves and of our audience always comes down to:

What do we see?

Upptack sees a future where mobile gaming isn’t tied to isolated, currency-driven replayability. We see a future of involved, flexible mobile games that enrich lives and leaves a legacy in the family household; that mobile gaming is something for children and families to spend time with, rather than waste time doing. That’s step one — creating a value proposition.

How do we see it?

What we see needs a shape — a structure — that people will understand. It needs a model. For one company, that’s an action-adventure franchise with role-playing and third-person combat. For another, it could be simulating competitive arena sports, but with cars instead of people.

For Upptack, it’s asymmetric, two-player co-operative gaming. If that’s just jargon, don’t worry. Asymmetry in games means a slightly different thing than the textbook definition.

Here’s an exercise of asymmetry in play — physical play to be exact. This is an active physical game we developed to demonstrate asymmetric co-play for a group of kids aged 6 to 12.

We’ve even got an instruction sheet to play the game with some friends!

Our instruction sheet for running a physical co-play game that uses asymmetry in play!

Try out “Mine the Field” in your next gym class or after-class get-together. You may find it fun! This is just one quick example of “how to see” asymmetry in action when it comes to people playing together — in the physical sense.

What does it look like?

In other words, how do we know we’re not tricking ourselves — and seeing what we want to see instead of what’s actually in front of us? In video games, these kinds of traps can spawn in endless ways — feature creep, unfun mechanics, even the game’s core features or selling points.

I don’t think there is a confirmed method of avoiding it (if there is, please let me know), but the most practiced answer is — iteration. Test things out repeatedly, at every phase, and the shape of what you’re trying to make will eventually take form in front of your eyes.

You’ll have to poke, prod, and evaluate its sturdiness, but eventually, the game that you’ve spent so much time looking at is the same one that everyone else, like your intended audience, finally sees too.

Sharpening Our Vision

We all wish we had a clear, distinct picture of what we’re making and what questions we’re answering from Day 1 on development. If that was the case from concept to launch, there wouldn’t be that much fun and unpredictability in making games, would there?

Here at Upptack, we’ve devoted a lot of resources to sharpening our vision. Finding the right questions to ask, how to ask them, and who to ask them to.

Seeing What You Want To See

Many other game studios are able to fully realize their vision and clearly execute it. Fundamentally, I think it’s because they believe that their games are what audiences expect to play. We tend to make what we know.

For a children’s mobile game, the rules are a bit different. It’d be a dream to be able to think like a kid, or know exactly what they desire out of the games they want to play with their parents, siblings, friends and family, but a when it comes down to it, a bit more work is needed.

If we open our eyes to the opportunity (and the value proposition), we can begin asking the right questions about our vision. What do we see in our vision? How do we see it implemented? Then, the process of sharpening and clarifying our vision after every phase is a continuous work in progress.

To avoid seeing what we want to see — and while it may work for other games that target other demographics — we have to find these answers out and hone in on what makes our vision a different shape, structure, and look from anyone else’s.

With enough practice, we won’t have trouble in both seeing what’s right in front of us, and what’s far out in the distance either.

For any creative project, having a vision from the start is key. It may change, mutate, and evolve — like ours always is — but as long as you believe in the process, it can only become clearer the more you refine it.

So go out, find your vision, and create!

Upptack Studios is a mobile gaming company making fulfilling cooperative experiences for children and families alike. This blog releases monthly and gathers our insights, updates, and learnings in one place. To subscribe for project updates on Upptack’s first game in development, visit www.upptackstudios.co and sign up for our monthly newsletter, which releases the first week of each month. Follow Upptack Studios on Twitter or Instagram at @upptackstudios.