I always love hearing about the points in game development where a big decision was made not to do something. Every game has moments like that – cut features, changes in design focus, unused assets – and they’re always fascinating, because they show a vision of what the game could have been, what it almost was. Sometimes whatever it is sounds more appealing than what we got – and, just as often, it sounds like it would have been a disaster, and a bullet was dodged.
It’s not just games that undergo this process, this cycle of growth and pruning, though it tends to be far more visible in games because it takes so long to make a game and the process leaves more behind in the form of demo footage and unused content. Every creation is the sum of countless decisions, decisions so small and subtle that in the moment of creation we don’t even notice we’ve made them. Every choice folds in on itself, and builds outwards, in such a way that a single slightly different choice made early on might butterfly effect out and completely change the whole project.
Then again, it might not. Because a decision made early on has so many later decisions stacked up after it, it is in some ways less important than a decision made later on in the creative process. For example, so many artists set out to create something new, to break their creative habits, and set out a sketch in a bold new style – only to find that, as they fill it out and polish it, it begins to look more and more like their previous work, the many intervening tiny choices of detail acting together to overwhelm the few big bold choices they meant to define the piece.
With all this in mind, it becomes increasingly difficult to see whether a given decision in the process is a good or a bad one, because what determines whether an artistic choice work or not work is entirely whether the future choices built on top of it make it work. So, what I’m saying is that every choice you make early on in building a work of art is simultaneously incredibly important and defines everything about what it will be – and also completely irrelevant because it will be outweighed by every future choice you make.
Okay. How does that make any sense?
Because art, and the decisions that go into it, are context. Every creative action you can take is only within your vocabulary because of the context of the life you live and have lived, and every choice you put into a work of art only has meaning in the context of its relationship to the preceding and succeeding choices. The specific analogy that comes to mind is, once again, playing a game of XCOM – because I’ve been playing so much XCOM and watching so much more that these analogies are coming to me very readily right now. When you move your units around the map, the early moves don’t directly bring you victory or disaster, but they do affect how likely your later moves are to be useful. The beginning of the combat is both incredibly important, because it sets the stage for all your other moves, but also largely irrelevant, since under most circumstances you have ample opportunity to course correct. Every decision matters, but even in a difficult encounter there are usually many potential paths to victory: As long as the moves you take still are contained somewhere within that victory possibility-space, you’re doing okay. This is actually all pretty much true of any tactical game, so if it makes more sense to you then feel free to substitute Chess or Go in the preceding analogy.
The point of all this is that there’s no benefit or reason to stressing over early decisions. The point of all this is that if you’re waiting to figure out where to start before you begin a project, you’re wasting your time. Begin anywhere. You can get anywhere from anywhere. Yes, I’ve made a blog post arguing pretty much the exact opposite of this as well, and yes I actually still agree with that blog post too. The first choice you make will define everything about your project, but so will all the other choices. Everything matters, but nothing matters so much, in art, that it’s worth being scared about. Just keep making choices. Just don’t run away. Eventually, somehow, you’ll have something worth being proud of.