Today I was reading this article (from a Brazilian gamedev website) and I was faced with the #2 tool that talked about an Inverted Pyramid.

I did some 5-minute-research on google about “Inverted Pyramid” and I didn’t find anything that could relate to this concept in game development, just for business decision making and news writing, and the purpose is a bit different to each one of them.

So what is the “Inverted Pyramid” for Game Development?

It is basically breaking your game into pieces, where the smaller piece is a finished game by itself, but not the actual game that you wanted to make. This smaller piece also can be called Minimum Viable Product (MVP).

After you have the Minimum Viable Product you start “iterating” over it, you add a feature that will result in another finished game, but maybe not quite the one you wanted to develop.

And you repeat the iterating process, you keep adding features and each feature will result in a game. This way, if you don’t like a feature or have to quit your project for some reason, you will have something finished and playable.

How do I do it? Just think in your game, now cut it to the essentials. Think of features that you can add that do not depend on other features. The MVP is your smaller triangle, each feature will make the triangle bigger and larger (and probably better! ).

Applying it to Zelda Souls

So, the point of writing all of this is to think how I can apply it to my biggest project at the moment, the Souls game with old Zelda aesthetics and top down view, which I’m currently naming “Zelda Souls”.

So I divided the game in some steps so I can develop my MVP and then start iterating and adding features.

And the steps are:

Core Game:

Minimum Viable Product (MVP): The Minimum Viable Product should be the Battle System, it’s also important being able to transition in and out of it.

Feature 0.5: Boss Battle System. Fighting Enemies is good, but fighting bosses is way cooler!!!

Feature 1: The first feature that I should  add to my game is a “Tile map Maker”. To help me create the maps for the character to run and battle!

Feature 2:  NPC’s and Dialog System. The character can run through the world and fight enemies, but a world without friendly people isn’t a world, the next step is to add NPC’s and a Dialog System so the player can chat with them.

Getting into Souls Games:

Feature 3: Consumable Items. With the MVP + F1 + F2 I have the game I want. So then I can start thinking on extras and features that could make it more interesting. Consumable Items to boost your strength, recover health and stamina, etc… Maybe I should even consider this in the battle system.

Feature 4: Equip-able Items. Making the character able to change his sword, shield and armor would be a nice plus!

Completely Optional:

Feature 5: Quests. Make NPC’s give some tasks to the player and reward him and he achieves it.

Last Words: I’ve never taken this approach of thinking my game as something simple (the MVP) with features and features on top of it, I’m feeling that with this in mind I will be able to take better decisions on what to add in the game for the future and what steps should I take to do it.