There comes a time in a video game's life when you have to make a decision: keep it or scrap it?

In video game design terms, we call this the "minimum viable product." Pretty much what the MVP is is the bare minimum to what could be your game. In my case, there was actually two components to the MVP: the battling portion, and the sandbox portion.

First, the sandbox portion:

Looks terrible huh? Part of that is my lack in artistic ability (I'll worry about that stuff later), but most MVPs look like this. Why? The idea is to test out the most basic mechanics and make sure that you can get them to work, and, perhaps just as importantly, that they're engaging. You don't want to spend countless hours making a game that isn't fun of course, so this is how you test that it is something you want to keep working on. Prettiness can come later after you've decided to commit to the project, otherwise you're just wasting time.

Way too often in my past I've gotten so into an idea, figured out everything I want, and tried to get artists to help and told everyone that I was making a new thing, only to get a little past this stage and decide that I didn't want to work on the project after all. It's an incredibly common problem in the game development world.

Secondly, the battling portion:

Notice the sprites that I "borrowed" from Pokemon? Yep, this is another example of how you test what a game will look like without actually buckling down and making all the assets before you know if it's good or not. Eventually the Houndour sprites will go away... eventually :P

I actually passed what you would call the "minimum viable product" several days ago, but I just took a few extra days to decide that I really did like this project before telling the world about it. Pretty much all that I needed for the MVP was mons, attacks that do damage, a world, and the ability to place and remove blocks. It didn't take but a little while to get to this stage.

If any of you are interested in making a game, try making the bare minimum of one to see if you can do it! Want to make a racing game? Make squares move around like a car would. Want a platformer? Again use squares, except this time make it jump on things. If you get to this point and decide that it isn't for you, then at least you tried, but if you don't, maybe you're missing out on potential!

That's all for this time, thanks for reading!