Questions and the Fog Of War in Game Dev

Read Time: 6 Minutes

You’ve probably been there. Your game has finished loading, and now you’re looking at a few tiles, or a planet, or a region. You’ve got a unit or two, or maybe a city or capital or something.

All around you is the unknown. The “fog of war” limits you from knowing much. 

Early on, that’s not that bad, as you don’t really have the capacity to respond to much more information than what you can see. You get to settling down, building infrastructure or units and - as time goes by - you begin to expand your vision (and power) into that fog.

What you discover could change the way you play, or perhaps cause you to meet an untimely end. It might also give you resources and the confidence to become the empire/civilization/country/conquering army that you always wanted to be.

But at the beginning, you’re just a few units surrounded by darkness.

Game development is not that different. 

You start out with an idea and maybe a few people working together. What you know is simple and high level. It’s entirely unvalidated. The unknowns are everywhere. You can’t see much, but you know enough to get started. 

Where things will end up, and what the game you make (or fail to make) will be you don’t know. There’s a lot of fog in game dev.

As you observe and learn, real life events that are analogous to running into a civilization incredibly close to yours can happen. Perhaps early on, you learn that there are other companies building competing products that are very similar to yours. Maybe you realize you’re on a much smaller island than you thought - the number of people who might like your game was more niche than you realized.

You’d wanted to go all out on expansion, scaling your team rapidly into production. But early tests and the technical foundations of your game aren’t as strong as you’d hoped. You need to resolve those issues before you can go crazy, or you’ll overextend yourself and get hammered.

I apply the concept of “fog of war” in many areas of game dev. Whether you’re capturing some of the unknowns that could make or break your game, or thinking about how confident you are in an estimated timeline for a milestone, recognizing what you don’t know will help guide your path and priorities.

And when it comes to walking through the phases of game dev, I think we need to imagine ourselves as that fledgling civilization just starting out.

Ideation

The Ideation phase (sometimes called concept, prototyping, or even - and unhelpfully - pre-production) is where games begin. At this point, everything is an idea. The fog of war is everywhere, and the path forward is vague and needs to be flexible. During ideation, you don’t want too many people, and you don’t want robust and exacting standards for just about anything (except perhaps hiring), because you are going to be asking huge questions that will change the direction of your entire production.

The point of ideation is to discover a game that you think is worth building and to do some rough testing of that hypothesis.

It is THE place for you and your game’s biggest questions. You need to answer them before you proceed. Stuff like:

• What impact do we want to have on the world?

• Where are we choosing NOT to play?

• What is the experience we want to create?

• Why do we think it will be compelling?

• Who will play our game?

• What is our competition?

• What culture do we want for this game team?

• How can we set ourselves up to learn rapidly?

• What is the simplest thing we could make that might help us understand if we’re onto something or not?

As you move through ideation, you will start to answer these big questions, and as you do, even more questions will emerge. BUT, as they continue to emerge, you’ll discover that the new questions slowly become “smaller” than the ones you started with. Eventually, none of the biggest questions remain.

The fog of war has been pushed out. Maybe you’ve found all the coasts. You know the territory a little bit, where barbarians/pirates might be hiding, what other civilizations are right around you, and where the resource rich areas are. While you might still be surprised by a pocket of fog here or there, you have enough info to plan out the next few turns. From the game dev lens, you’re confident enough on the few and massive questions to start engaging with those slightly smaller, more detailed questions.

You’re ready for preproduction.

Pre-production

Pre-production (often called “preprod,” with some people thinking about this as “vertical slice”) aims to prove that the idea you’ve selected is something that can be built, and further, that we want to build it.

The questions are individually smaller, but there are many more of them. You start thinking about what production will look like. You probably throw away a lot of crappy prototypes. You probably do some scaling up.

Here are some example questions you might want to solve (please don’t adopt this list thoughtlessly, many could be asked earlier or later depending on your context):

• How exciting is this concept to us?

• How exciting is this concept to players?

• What are the major risks we see with this being successful?

• Is our core loop solid?

• Do we know what our bigger engagement loops will look like?

• Do we have the runway to get this done, and if not, what are we going to do about that?

• What should our technical foundation look like?

• How can we better understand our eventual player, their patterns, their preferences?

• Do we have the expertise to pull this off?

• What are the biggest remaining questions that we need to answer?

There are so many more that could be written, but at the start of preprod, you’re still working on pretty big questions, where by the end you want to have locked down a lot of production related questions like staffing plans and best guess milestones, and - as best as we can guess today - product priorities for the game. 

By the time you exit preprod, everything accessible from your starting continent/system/area has at least been seen. The fog of war feels far away. You’ve allied or eliminated anyone nearby, and the barbarians are long gone. There still might be dangers lurking somewhere else, but you’re actively scouting for threats. You’ve got a lock on the resources you think you need, your tech tree is ticking along like it should. You’re stable. This is good, because by the end of preprod, changing direction becomes very difficult. You’ve got some unique wonders that no one else does. Enough customization through buildings and tech have been selected that if you decide you want to win a diplomatic victory instead of a science victory, it’s going to be hard to pull off. 

The questions continue to shrink and multiply. They become more tactical in nature. You’ve chosen your path. The team’s burnrate and size are about to go up. Put mildly, making big changes will be PAINFUL. You need to be open to that happening, while recognizing that once you enter production, man it would suck.

Production

Now you’ve reached where too many studios rush to. Now you’re at that magical place where you get to build the thing and realize just how much more difficult it will be than you expected. Depending on the size of your game and budget, your organization now has multiple layers. Mistakes made earlier in laying cultural and technical foundations will become magnified. If present, bad tools, poor leadership, and an inability to iterate quickly will hamstring your studio.

Production is about building. You are still learning and observing the broader industry and your specific players, but most people are in the weeds, because you need to actually make the game now, and every little thing will end up being harder than the plan said it would be. You’re cutting scope, you’re struggling to maintain morale and/or a shared vision. Your leaders (discipline specific and otherwise) are being taxed and distracted by a million different things that COULD be done, and having to stay focused on what should be done, which isn’t always as clear as you’d like.

From the strategy game perspective, while you’re the master of the continent you started on, you discover that there are other continents, some that have been conquered by large and aggressive civilizations who now see you as their next prize. Some of your infrastructure - so well optimized when you were the big fish in a small pond - now seems inadequate and malformed. Your bases of production keep having to produce units when you want to keep producing buildings, just to keep the borders protected. 

You find out you have a much lower capacity for doing … just about everything than you thought, and that previously distant fog of war is unbelievably threatening. When war happens, you aren’t just fighting in a few spots or near a few cities. You’re fighting everywhere, managing everything. What seemed like an endless supply of gold is suddenly a precious resource you are almost forced to expend to stave off disaster by bribing an opponent out of an alliance with your rival who is - by themselves - pushing you to your limit.

You are spread thin, in both attention and in staff, for the massive number of things that must be done and tactical questions that must be answered.

Some really vague examples of questions in production might be:

• What scope do we cut? (repeat every month or quarter until you ship)

• What’s “good enough” for X system?

• How do we move people around to get the right stuff done without taking big hits to team effectiveness?

• How are we staying in regular contact with the players?

• What’s happening with our hopefully growing community?

• How is our marketing plan going?

• What is the most important work that we’re pushing off till after everything is in place?

• How are we dealing with risks?

• How are teams interacting with each other?

• Who handles how shared resources on our team get allocated?

• How do we keep so many people doing so many different things focused on what matters most?

• When do we revisit bits of prototype that snuck into production, if ever?

Production is a time of organizing the chaos of a scaling org, a growing game (and hopefully community), while still being responsive to everything that might change. It will require ingenuity, it will require brute effort, it will require patience and endurance. 

By the end, if things have gone reasonably well, you’ll have a functional game with players who want to play it.

The game has been built. It’s time to close things out. The questions are now very small and also virtually infinite in number. You’ve more than committed, you’ve executed against that commitment. If you’re wrong, you’ll find out soon. But before then, it’s time for Post-Production.

Post-Production

I won’t go all the way through Post-production. Suffice to say, it is where everyone is trying to figure out which of the infinite questions to actually address and which it ignores. It’s the final few turns where you’re racing to hit your science victory before your rival gets to their cultural victory.

You can’t lose the player in all this, but any major pivot at this point will be desperation and likely catastrophic. But you still have to listen, and if you’ve done a good job, your team will do better than you’d think at responding to what players are telling you.

Oh, and most of the time “post-production” just gets eaten by production running late. Hopefully you at least avoid that!

Eventually, the time arrives, the “game” is over, and you ship.

The End (and maybe Beginning)

A civilization wins. Maybe it wasn’t yours. A few turns before you got that ship in orbit, your biggest remaining rival completed a cultural victory. The launch fails. You gather your learnings and wonder if you’ll take another stab at the game. 

In real life, there are no reloads, no quick saves to go back to. Time only moves forward.

Maybe it was yours. If so, a new game immediately begins as you now need to support a product that players love to play and that makes things way more complicated. Hopefully you didn’t burn out getting to ship if so, or you’re going to have some fried people needing to be on their A game to handle what’s headed your way. But, all things considered, that’s the problem you wanted to have.

If you stop and think for a moment, you realize you learned a heck of a lot no matter what happened, and what you learned you can take with you into the next game, if you choose to play one. On the hardest difficulty level (a permanent setting in game dev), there are never guarantees. But wow it can still be a fun ride.

Summary

Game dev is a never-ending set of problems and questions, starting with, “What the heck are we doing?” and ending with, “Which of these 12 blocker bugs are REALLY blockers?”

The questions will tend to shrink and multiple over time. You scale up to address that.

The fog of war never really goes away, but by the end you should have pushed it back enough that you can move confidently towards your game.

At every phase of game dev, more studios will drop. Many don’t get out of ideation, many that don't make it to production. Of those that get that far, still more fall before reaching launch. 

Some tips:

• Don’t lose the questions. Never stop learning. Never stop playtesting and finding players to engage with your game. Keep pushing the fog of war back.

• Prioritize the questions that matter most at every phase. This requires judgment and discussion. 

• Err on the side of staying “too small” rather than becoming “too large.” The problems of scale will tend to be worse than the problem of “not having enough people.”

• Similarly, err on the side of earlier rather than later phases. The rush to production before the studio and game is ready is a huge problem. It sucks sometimes when you have some hanging problem that seems unresolvable, but it won’t get better later. It will usually get worse.

Enjoy the game. The fog will always be there. Don’t let that stop you from playing.

Whenever you’re ready, there are 3 ways we can help you…

—>Courses built by game devs for game devs - check out “Succeeding in Game Production” HERE.

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