#Slice it game full

The vertical slice is a small, self-contained chunk of the game that allows someone to play through it and see all of the major systems of the game working together. This is sometimes also called a “first playable”. So what you need to show is a “vertical slice”. You can show a prototype for each system to the check-writers, but just because the individual parts are good doesn’t mean you can easily put them all together for a fun product. Some of them are further along than others, but they represent all of the major systems in the game. Here are four different major example systems that need to be constructed and built, and they are all proceeding at different rates based on how many people are working on them, how complete the design is, and so on and so forth.

Here’s my awesome MS Paint rendition of that preproduction development and prototyping process:

The people who write the checks will want to see some sort of demo of the product working before they start paying for developers to come on and work on it. Why? Because in order to finish the game, you’re going to need a bunch of additional engineers, designers, artists, and QA to create, proof, test, and validate the systems and content in the time you’ve scheduled, and all these people are going to cost money.

#Slice it game full

You’ve got concepts and a design ready, and you’ve gotten a few prototypes built to showcase the individual major systems at work, but you still have to get final approval before leaving preproduction and entering full production mode. Imagine that you’ve got a game that’s being planned. This time around, I’ll be writing about something called the Vertical Slice. Some of them may be old, some of them may be new, some of them may have different meanings to the layman. In a new sort of series here on the blog, I’m going to write a little about the various terms used in the industry to refer to things.