Core gameplay development path?

Hello,



I have had the opportunity to work as a lead designer in in several PC and mobile game projects, and have also worked with some well known IPs. I've read things about Line of Defence with a professional interest, as I think it demonstrates one of the typical game design problems one encounters.



The development path of the game strikes me as flawed. As you know, one of the rule of thumbs of game design is that you have to be able to start testing and iterating the core gameplay of your product AS EARLY AS POSSIBLE. If you don't, you might be heading to the wrong direction and making fixing things harder and harder later on, impossible even. In the case of LOD, the core gameplay is massive multiplayer combined arms warfare - or, at least, combined arms warfare. Correct me if I'm wrong, but it seems that no iterating has been done on the core gameplay whatsoever- even the basic infantry controls, like iron sights are still broken, and no vehicles exist in the current live build. Of course it's possible you have been doing this type of gameplay testing in 20-50 people groups in some dev environment, but there is no indication of that either. If this is the case and you don't speak about it or show it, it is simply bad marketing. Compare this, for example, Eternal Crusade, WH40k themed massive shooter aspiring to be somewhat but not quite similar to LOD: they have been testing and refining the core gameplay very early in the development, in order to get it just right.



So, in order to make the core gameplay solid, you haven't even started yet. And getting that in proof-of-concept shape should have been one of the main goals of the early development. You might, for example, discover that the scale and composition of your huge scenes don't really work with the gameplay you have in mind, thus resulting a costly reworking of the scenes.