The art of a Pass

Abandoned Mine has been an interesting experience in diving into the Creation Engine and getting myself familiar with the tools and practicing some design fundamentals. That said, there's elements that I've taken away from the experience that would have helped speed up design and iteration time and would have made it better quicker. These lessons I call 'answering the why': creating an answer to your design question before you actually get the point of asking it.  These questions  are ones that you generally wouldn't think about if you are both inexperienced and/or getting swept up in your idea: 'is this space the right size?', 'do I have all of the gameplay sections I want to explore?', 'what do I do now?'. The biggest aspect of this is understanding how to plan, take iteration one step at a time, and play test as soon as you can. I'm going to be taking the steps of what makes each progressive pass and breaking them into digestible chunks over the course of the next week.