Right, so we were kicking off this new game idea. Everyone was buzzing, throwing ideas around like crazy. Someone, probably read it in a book or something, brought up defining all the “actors” in our game plan upfront. Sounded smart, right? Get everything clear from the start.
Getting Started – The Clean Idea
So, I figured, okay, let’s do this properly. I grabbed a whiteboard, virtual one since we were all over the place. Started listing things out. Obvious stuff first:
- The Player Character (duh)
- Basic Enemies
- The Big Boss Guy
Felt pretty good, nice and organized. Thought this would make everything smooth sailing. We’d know exactly who does what, what interacts with what. Easy peasy.
Where it Got Messy
Then the questions started popping up. What about the shopkeeper? Is he an ‘actor’? He just stands there, but the player interacts with him. What about the environment itself? Like traps, or doors that need keys? Do we call those ‘actors’? Suddenly, this neat little list wasn’t so neat.
We spent, I kid you not, like half a meeting arguing about whether a talking signpost counted. A talking signpost. People were pulling definitions from different places, some saying an actor needs ‘intent’, others saying anything the player interacts with counts. It started feeling less like planning and more like philosophy class, and frankly, nobody had time for that.
The design kept changing too. We’d add a new type of enemy, or a friendly NPC who gives quests, and the whole ‘actor’ list needed updating. It became this extra piece of paperwork that lagged behind the actual game ideas. It felt like we were documenting for the sake of documenting, not actually making the game plan clearer.
What We Actually Did
After a while, we kinda just… stopped trying so hard to make the perfect ‘actor’ list. It wasn’t helping us make decisions faster. Instead, we focused on the core interactions.
We’d ask simple questions:
- What can the player do?
- What things can hurt the player?
- What things can the player talk to or get stuff from?
- What things block the player?
We still talked about players, enemies, NPCs, interactive objects, but we dropped the strict ‘actor’ label thing because it was causing more trouble than it was worth. We just described what things did in plain English. It was messier on paper, maybe, but it worked better for actually getting the game designed and built.
So yeah, that whole formal ‘actors in the game plan’ thing? Sounded good, but in practice, for us on that project, it just got in the way. Sometimes you just gotta ditch the fancy labels and talk about what stuff actually does in the game. Keep it simple, you know?
