Sketching out a better gaming future

Gears Of War has been hailed for costing 'only' $10m to develop

Computer game developers may be given more freedom to experiment and innovate much more if a system known as "game sketching" takes off.

Developed by students at Carnegie Mellon university in Adelaide, Australia, game sketching is designed to replace game elements that usually take months of design and developer work with puppets, actors and basic virtual characters.

The hope is that it will allow game makers to try new things and to rapidly prototype a game and allow playability as early as possible.

"This is a technology that is useful for companies that are exploring new intellectual properties and new games," John Buchanan, Director of Carnegie Mellon's Entertainment Technology Center, told BBC World Service's Digital Planet programme.

"These techniques are also applicable to interactive web technologies - anything where the design involves the interaction of a user, where you want to understand what the experience of being in that space, or that world, is."

Experimental tools

Game sketching works by focusing on the interactions that take place in a game, rather than the technology.

Because of the time and cost involved in bringing a game to the stage where it is playable, it is difficult for software companies to find out exactly how a game will play until a late stage in its development - possibly a year or more.

As a result, games publishers can sometimes be faced with the unappealing dilemma of cancelling a game on which much money and time has already been spent, or carrying on with developing it even though it may have fundamental gameplay flaws.

Goblet of Fire was re-engineered to show game sketching works

But Mr Buchanan said that game sketching promises to let developers take a look at their ideas within a day or two.

"The focus on building stuff and not on exploring the space of the interactions possible is endemic within the industry," Mr Buchanan argued.

"We are often far too busy building stuff to take the time out to think... we believe that establishing a culture of game sketching will enable teams within the industry to explore new ideas in a fun, cheap and risk-free manner."

In one example, the game Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire was "reverse engineered" to demonstrate how a part of the game could be very quickly realised.

In it, flat, human-controlled basic cut-outs of Harry and his friends Hermione and Ron battled dugbots and tried to open a gate.

Tests showed that players found playing both the game sketch and the finished game were essentially the same - even though the game sketch had only taken a tiny fraction of the time to produce.

"The use of game sketching allows experimentation with little risk," Mr Buchanan explained.

"We give managers with tight budgets a tool with which their employees can explore new ideas at minimal cost."