Minimum viable product

A minimum viable product (MVP) in terms of a game is the distilled core of the game idea, with all of the bells and whistles stripped away. Games developed as an MVP offer only the most essential features needed to offer the intended game-play experience.

Definition

A minimum viable product is a product development concept where the goal is to satisfy a known need of an established (or at least identified) consumer base. MVP is generally the core of any adopter/customer-first development project.

For something to be an MVP, it needs to satisfy three conditions:

• It must have an audience.
• That audience must want something specific.
• That audience is satisfied by the product at its base form.

The MVP is the expected state a game should be in e.g. at an early access launch or when launching after a barely funded crowdfunding campaign where none of the stretch-goals were reached. For us, this might mean making a visual novel focused exclusively on one particular character type or trope for people who are fans of the trope. (e.g a visual novel exclusively about tsundere characters for tsundere fans.)

Development process

In the visual novel scene, newbie developers are typically advised to start out with the bare bones of a visual novel - usually a kinetic novel, with one character, and a scene of a few hundred words. This is to teach a newbie how much work goes into even just that so they can better understand the scope of a visual novel project and how to plan for the next. It is generally not intended to be the prototype for a full game.

More elaborate projects may wish to follow the general game development practice of starting from the basics (script + choices) and adding in more optional features after the MVP for the game has been completed. A feature such as fully animated cut-scenes may be something to look into after you’ve finished the MVP for the project and know better about your budget; etc rather than holding up the entire project on something you may not have the budget for in the end and now can no longer afford to complete the game at all.

Example minimum viable product for a visual novel

A MVP for a hypothetical romance visual novel would only include the bare minimum custom assets needed to offer a satisfying experience. Therefore, the most resources would go to the presentation of the love interests, while everything else would be limited as much as possible. The following example assumes that the developer uses a game engine that already provides all necessary features for visual novel game-play (e.g. Ren'Py).

A sample otome game in its MVP state

Feature	MVP State
Main character	either off-screen/first-person or represented by a silhouette
Love Interests	only one or two love interests, each with a limited sprite set with one pose and five expressions
CGs	two CGs in total, one for each love interest (there are genre expectations to reward the player with a CG at the end of a route)
Backgrounds	six backgrounds for the most important locations, all of them are filtered photos or stock images
Logo	a single logo, can be self-designed but professionally made logos are recommended
Writing	25k words for the common route and one route per love interest, editing done in-house
Programming	done in-house, no complicated features that would be time-consuming for the developer to implement
GUI	Free-to-use GUI swap-ins or paid GUI templates
Music	royalty-free music only
Sound Design	free sound effects only