Gamespot recently held an interview with XCOM 2 Creative Director Jake Solomon. The topic of discussion was similar to Solomon’s talk at PAX East last month. He touched on failure being a big part of game development.
XCOM 2 Creative Director explains why failure is unavoidable
Solomon said that he thinks the real challenge comes with either creating something new or rebooting. Just by the nature, developers will have to take some risks as well as attemps at things. The sheer size of triple-A development can also raise the stakes and alter those challenges.
You have to take risks, you have to innovate, otherwise you’re not offering value and people will find it somewhere else. At the same time, those risks could sink you if you don’t fail fast enough and get to the actual right answer, so I think it really is kind of a tightrope.
At the same time, Solomon says taht developers can not dwell on failure for long. It needs to offer a lesson, and do so efficiently.
When we fail, look at it right in the eyes and say, “What did that teach us?” And we very quickly need to get onto our next failure because we’ve got to get through these failures until, all of a sudden, we have something that we say, “Okay, this is good enough.”
You can read the whole interview by following the link above.
