Hi, I'm getting a lot into game design lately and I hear a lot of talk about minimum viable products and gameplay loops. I understand the gist of it but I'm confused about how you would get a minimum viable products in some games without an obvious gameplay loop (if they even have 1, I just assume they do but Idk what it is). I'm thinking about games that are like Bendy and the ink machine and layers of fear. I'm wondering how games like those would create an mvp. Any help would be great, thank you.

It's both very simple and very challenging: is your game fun and complete enough to be played and technically working well enough to be installed without causing trouble and support calls? Is it bad enough to blacklist you as an incompetent developer, or good enough to be promising despite being obviously unfinished? What is the purpose (publicity, playtesting…) of circulating a game prematurely before it's finished?

The term means different things to different people. It can also apply more than once.

It can mean putting together the mechanics to the point other people can try them, or possibly to the point where the mechanic is feature complete. It can mean a vertical slice where all the components for a segment are complete so it can be shown in a demo or sizzle video.

Often there are several levels. You can make a MVP with paper cutouts, which are easy and cheap. You can also use a “man behind the curtain” approach to follow the logic and ensure it works, and to iterate on the idea. Then you can do it in software at proofs of concepts, at feature complete, each can be seen as a type of minimum viable product.

Ahhh, okay yeah I'm still new to this sorry. I wanted to use the mvp to test if the gameplay is fun and interesting. Sorry for the confusion

What “minimum viable product” means in practice is “do the important things first”. That's always going to be a moving target. Obviously the game isn't actually going to be commercially viable until shortly before it's actually finished, but some aspects of the game will always be more important than others. No point in creating a dozen different factions in your RTS game until at least one faction is truly playable. No point in creating a dozen unit types in your RTS game until the game is playable with just one unit type. No point in creating fancy visual effects and polished final artwork until everything in the game has at least some basic placeholder artwork. No point in worrying about music and sound effects until the game is playable.

@a light breeze Ok, so what I'm understanding is that I should focus on making one section of the game with the most important aspects of the game and that'll be my mvp. Or am I understanding wrong.

I'd rather talk about prototypes, probably separate ones for different purposes (testing basic gameplay, testing your build system and your asset pipeline, testing whether your graphics look good, testing the performance limitations of your engine, testing random new ideas…).

A minimum viable product, being a product, is distinguished by the fact that it is officially released to end users (maybe alpha and beta testers), and it doesn't seem to be the case yet. Unlike the typical case of web apps that can effortlessly update their minimum viable product step by step into an advanced product, a game usually has to be good and far beyond a MVP from the beginning.

Just ask yourself this question: if you could only add one more element to the game before releasing it (as preview, early access, alpha, beta, final release, or whatever), what would that element be? Then work on that one element. Do this repeatedly until the game is finished. “Minimal viable product” is a journey, not a destination.

Okay, I think I understand a lot better now. Thank you to all of you for helping me out.