The design and programming of a game don't have to mean the same thing. While the history of game design is marked by many programmers designing and coding simultaneously, several classic games, such as Super Mario Bros, evolved out of designer and programmer working together. In the twenty years since Shigeru Miyamoto communicated his idea for a guy jumping around against a sky background, the vocubulary and conceptual toolset of game design theory has matured dramatically. At True Vacuum, every core team member has a wide and deep familiarity with design theory, enabling experimental design problems to be discussed and approached in a rigorous way. Our experience practicing, devising and publishing theory also makes us skillful at analyzing playable games, or recommending design patterns for a burgeoning project.
Creativity can't be planned. The practice of allocating tasks in a prescribed order between highly coupled team segments, known as the Waterwall method, is not approrpriate for game projects, where creative flexibility is at a premium. True Vacuum functions to prototype and iterate towards a quality core play model, before the majority of a project budget is put into producing all the assets and secondary code. In working with production designers and concept artists, we lay the constraints for their creativity and then give them the freedom to express their talents.
The game playing audience is rapidly growing into new demographics, and with these new demographics comes a whole ecology of unexplored niches. The arrival of new business models makes exploring these new niches highly profitable. While some game types may struggle to generate sales in a download/conversion business model, the same game might virally flourish under a free-to-play model driven by advertising or micro-transaction revenues. The prevalence of digitial distribution channels on seventh generation consoles, and internationally with growing broadband penetration, mean that underserved international and demographic markets are starving for content that can now be feasibly delivered. Our long term strategy is to first be involved in the production of mass-market games that expand the overall audience, and then to create artistic titles that appeal to newly unearthed niches.
For too long the design of games has been dominated by an adversarial attitude regarding players. Most games involved a potentially grueling challenge that the play must overcome to proceed, often dying and reincarnating several times in the process. This grew out of the arcade business model, where player death equalled more revenue, but oddly persisted through several generations of home console and computer gaming. The most likely cause of this persistence is a lack of player feedback in the process of a game's development. As soon as a playable prototype is ready for a project, we involve uninitiated play testers from a target demographic and incorporate their feedback into our design decisions.
