[ZenoArrow]

You don't have to build the whole game to get started on testing how fun it is to play, you start with an ideas sandbox and go from there. A large part of modern game development is involved in building up art assets, you only need a minimal set of art assets before you start playtesting and refining ideas.

[hacker_9]

Not always true. For example the combat animation in the Arkham games - without it how do you test the combat is satisfying? Or the super cars in GTA, how to you test they break in interesting ways without having the finished mesh? Or the gun projectiles in Fallout - how do you tweak them to feel right without a good bullet mesh, physics, collision, particle effects and so on? Satisfying game play is just as visual as it is functional.

[ZenoArrow]

I said minimal, not zero. To use your Arkham combat example, you do need to build the character animations, but you don't need to build the Arkham city environment in which those combat animations will eventually take place.

To give a visual example, in Street Fighter 5 there's the training stage, which is very simple but ideal for testing character animations and game mechanics. If you were developing Street Fighter 5, wouldn't you build such an environment first?

http://media.eventhubs.com/images/2015/07/07_betapics02.jpg

[hacker_9]

You are saying then that the animations are 'minimal' in the Arkham games, which they are not. To make the animation as fluent as it is would require a lot of work and tweaking. Street Fighter on the other hand has a defined set of animations that are played independently of the attack animation, resulting in far less work but overall less satisfying visuals.

Finally, of course you can build the environment separately if there is no dependency on it.

[ZenoArrow]

> "You are saying then that the animations are 'minimal' in the Arkham games, which they are not."

I'm saying for playtesting they are the minimum you need to do the playtesting. If playtesting is a priority then you work on the elements important for playtesting first. "Minimal" is not a reflection on the amount of work that goes into getting up to the playtesting baseline.