Game Prototyping
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Coming up with an original idea for a game can be hard enough, but how do you know if your idea will actually work? Of course, you could just trust your own design skills and start implementing the game. That’s not an approach I’d recommend, though. No matter how good and experienced you are at game design, an idea can always turn out different than you think and it would be a shame if you found that out when you’re already halfway through development. I firmly believe that you should build a prototype for any game idea you consider implementing.
Casual Game Design » Building a prototype
Problem summary Design problems are typically complex, “ill-structured” and can only be well understood through exploration. As a result, there are many subtle, but critical questions about these problems that only learners themselves can answer. The trick lies in finding how to find what the questions are, and how to ask them. Discussion
Prototype early and often - Prototype early and often
If a picture is worth a thousand words, a good prototype can be worth far more. Prototypes of video games can communicate ideas and mechanics much more efficiently than meetings or a design document. Prototypes also save time, money, and unnecessary frustration during the design process. Sometimes, it's not possible to create an electronic prototype of a video game, due to software or hardware issues, financial cost, or a lack of time, but with a few office supplies and a bit of ingenuity, game development students (and even the pros) can make useful and purposeful paper prototypes of game ideas.
Paper Prototyping: 5 Facts for Designing in Low-Tech
Paper Prototyping: 5 Facts for Designing in Low-Tech
If a picture is worth a thousand words, a good prototype can be worth far more. Prototypes of video games can communicate ideas and mechanics much more efficiently than meetings or a design document. Prototypes also save time, money, and unnecessary frustration during the design process. Sometimes, it's not possible to create an electronic prototype of a video game, due to software or hardware issues, financial cost, or a lack of time, but with a few office supplies and a bit of ingenuity, game development students (and even the pros) can make useful and purposeful paper prototypes of game ideas.
I’ve spent some time in previous posts describing the benefits and process of game prototyping. You’ll create more innovative game mechanics, weed out bad concepts early, and help ensure that your final product is highly addictive. As with any good technique, there are several notable pitfalls and drawbacks to prototyping that a savvy practitioner should be mindful of.
Lost Garden
Games from Within | Prototyping: You’re (Probably) Doing It Wrong
You’re not alone, I was also doing prototyping wrong until a few years ago. There are probably many different ways of prototyping games correctly, and maybe your way works great for you. In that case, a more accurate title for this post could have been “Prototyping: I Was Doing It Wrong”. A good game prototype is something fast/cheap that allows you to answer a specific question about your game. The key points there are fast/cheap and specific question . It’s not a level of a game, it’s not a “vertical slice”, and it’s certainly not an engine for the game.
Earlier this month, I embarked on a two-part odyssey chronicling the misadventures of my design team as we built an analog game for class. You can read part one here , but the tl;dr version goes like this: We spent two weeks of a three-week project developing a game that we were too stubborn to admit broken. It was broken because we split the focus of our team, ignored crucial states of play, and waited too long to prototype. At the end of the second week we scrapped our previous board game model, and decided to do a pen and paper RPG. It was an odd choice considering the time frame, but there was logic behind it.
Bored Game – A Cautionary Tale For Design Students (Part 2)
Potential game ideas; every game developer has them. Ask any game developer and I am sure that they have some great game ideas that they would pursue if given the opportunity. Some people think these game ideas aren’t really useful; but it really depends on the application.
Paper Prototyping – Putting Your Games on Paper » #AltDevBlogADay
Game Prototyping 101
This article tells you how to get started with game prototyping. Prototypes can be analog or digital, made out of paper, assembler, clay or python. They can take any shape or form, but still share some key properties. The reason for a prototype is always that you want to test a specific feature, technique or design decision as cheap as possible. In order to make the prototype cheap, it needs to be easy to create and fast to get started. Use whatever is at hand or, even better, create a prototyping environment.
Here's a crazy game idea: Drag trash-talkin' gobs of goo to build a giant tower higher and higher. They squirm and giggle and climb upward over the backs of their brothers, but be careful! A constant battle against gravity, if you build a tower that's too unstable, it will all fall down. "Tower of Goo" was downloaded over 100,000 times within months of hitting the net, it was dubbed “Internet Game of the Month” in one magazine, it was demoed on G4 and at the Experimental Gameplay Workshop at GDC, and it was one of over fifty games we made as a part of the Experimental Gameplay Project at Carnegie Mellon's Entertainment Technology Center. <a href="http://adserver.adtechus.com/adlink/3.0/5242.1/2382763/0/0/ADTECH;loc=300;key='+adkeys+';grp='+adrand+'" target="_blank"><img src="http://adserver.adtechus.com/adserv/3.0/5242.1/2382763/0/0/ADTECH;loc=300;key='+adkeys+';grp='+adrand+'" border="0" width="0" height="0"></a> And like the rest of them, it was made in under a week, by one person.
