Bonfire Studios co-founder and Blizzard veteran Rob Pardo, known for shaping notable franchises like StarCraft, World of Warcraft and Diablo, told attendees at his GDC Festival of Gaming keynote that “love” is perhaps the most important development milestone of all.
Discussing lessons learned during his decades in the trenches of development, Pardo suggests there is a telltale sign that almost always signals when a project is primed for success.
“The press will sometimes come up to me and they’ll always ask that question of ‘well, how do you know when a game is going to [be a] hit?’ and I’ll usually give them a very similar sort of anecdote,” says Pardo. “I’ll tell them invariably, there’s always this point in the development process where the team starts extending playtests and they end up loving playing the game almost more than making the game itself.”
Pardo says that moment is one of the “truest measures” of a project’s potential. “I’ll tell you, on those games that [I’ve worked on] that ended up getting cancelled, they never were able to reach that milestone,” he continues.
The veteran designer believes “something special happens” when a team becomes more interested in playing their own game than anything else—not least because there are plenty of finished titles out in the world they could be playing instead.
“What happens is we start seeing this virtuous cycle, because the development team is now not only playing their favorite game, but they get to make it better every single day. They really become obsessed with improving it,” says Pardo.
“They start experimenting the new ideas, and maybe you even see developers on the team get genuinely upset when they miss a playtest. I think what I’m really trying to say with all this is the most important milestone in development is when a team deeply falls in love with the game they’re making. In my opinion, if developers don’t love playing the game, it’s kind of hard to imagine players eventually loving the game either.”
It’s at this point, says Pardo, that a team stops chasing what the audience wants and begins to build something they genuinely believe in. That authenticity, he stresses, is what will ultimately reel players in.
Game Developer and GDC Festival of Gaming are sibling companies under Informa Festivals.