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⬅️ Previous Article: What's in a Vertical Slice?
➡️ Next Article: Building a Team
In the last article, we talked about the ingredients of a great vertical slice. It's time to sit down, put pen to paper, and figure out exactly what ingredients are going into yours. This is scoping.
The first thing I want to do is separate scoping from estimating:
Scoping is the process of determining what you’ll include in your vertical slice (and what you’ll exclude).
Estimating is the process of determining how long each of the components of your vertical slice will take to complete.
We’re just focused on scoping for now. It’ll be a high-level process that operates as a to-do list for your project.
Within scoping, you can get pretty granular. Take a look at three ways you can describe a cabinet:
Option 1 | Option 2 | Option 3 |
|---|---|---|
Cabinet, three shelves, holds food | 26” x 14” wood cabinet with three shelves, creating 8” tall storage areas | 3 14x14x.7” wood shelves, 12 1” wooden dowels, 1 26” x 14” cabinet door, embellished with trim, 3 cabinet hinges, gold |
Options 2 and 3 contain a lot of detail, which would be great if our goal was to go out and get supplies for a cabinet (or, in game terms, if our goal was to design a single enemy). But right now our goal is to map out the whole kitchen. Option 1 is a fine place to start.
Let’s put this into game terms and build a vertical slice scoping document. I’m going to advocate for splitting this document into two sections.
The first section contains:
Gameplay loop: write out a succinct description of the gameplay loop of your vertical slice (what the player will experience). See What's in a Vertical Slice?
Creative pillars: these are important to keep in mind at all times during the design process. See Creative Pillars
Moments: jot down the moment(s) you want the player to experience during your vertical slice. I make a habit of making sure every moment refers back to one of my creative pillars. Your creative pillars make your game special, so you should strive to put them right in front of the player’s face. See What's in a Vertical Slice?
The second section contains a list of assets you’ll need to create in the making of your vertical slice. It should be grouped by asset type, and it should generally amount to a to-do list of things to design, build, and implement.
Some examples of asset types:
Player
Enemies
Allies
Buildings
Environment
Items
Power-ups
Bosses
Guns
Pokemon
This list of components varies tremendously based on your game’s genre. Take “player” for example—in many games, you control a character, but what about in 4x games? RTS games? In those games, it’s rare to point to a character and say “that’s the player.”
That makes each game's organization pretty unique! And that makes this process a little vague. If you’re having trouble getting started, look back on some of the Market Research you should have done before this point.
Take the closest game you can find to yours, play a level, and jot down everything you see. It’s pretty tiring! But you’ll start to group things over time—okay, there are 3 different enemy types, 3 basic buildings, 3 advanced buildings, 2 resource types, etc. etc. That will help you come up with your own categories to populate.
Here’s an example document I spun up from Railgun Games’ Deathland Drifters, which I’ve helped produce over the last year. Note that not everything is crystal clear; there are quite a few question marks throughout. You’re not going to know exactly what works until you make it, so there’s no point getting hyper-specific. Take your best guess, jot it down, and get to the point where you feel like you understand your game’s component parts.
Once you have this document completed, you’ll be in a good position to start estimating a chunk of this work and commit to your first milestone. Both are production topics, and I'll cover them in the next section of this site. You can start your production journey at Intro to Production, or read the final Planning article, Building a Team, if you need additional firepower in your studio.
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