One of the important things to consider when setting out to make a prototype is what ideas and goals need to be evaluated. One of the better ways to do this is to pose questions about the aspects of a game’s design that need to be answered. Is the primary activity enjoyable? Are players understanding the game’s theme? Is the color palette working stylistically and functionally? Prototyping should always be driven by questions like this so that you can keep the game’s design moving forward. This is the transition from conceptualization to prototyping—taking the goals and design values generated during conceptualization, and creating prototypes that explore open design questions that will be answered through playtesting.
Early in the process, getting from an idea to a prototype as fast as possible is important to really see ideas in action. Later, it might take a good deal of time to get from design revisions to a new prototype. The important thing is to remain focused on the most efficient way to give form to the questions about the game’s design.
The biggest thing to remember with prototypes is their purpose is to provide you with answers to key questions that help you make decisions along the way of your design and development process.
Macklin, Colleen; Sharp, John. Games, Design and Play (Game Design) (p. 183). Pearson Education. Kindle Edition.
Not all prototypes must be in the same format or medium as your actual game. You could be making a full action video game and still prototype out concepts using very different media. Like Paper.
Paper prototypes involve laying out ideas and working out interactions or concepts you might have within gameplay that can be quickly and effectively rendered on paper. The whole point of the prototype is to test ideas... and especially to test ideas on players. An example paper prototype might be a simple sketch of a level for your Donkey Kong like platformer game. You can then provide players with a simple cutout of your avatar (or not) and ask people to describe different strategies they might take when given the rules and controls. There are a ton more concepts you can create with paper cutouts or sketches that are WAY faster than building out the game and mechanics to get to testing. If your question can be described and understood with paper, then consider utilizing it.
Similar to paper prototypes, sometimes you can describe something about your game and have questions about it by having players enact aspects of the games physically. POssibly you are curious about how players will strategize within the games rules and mechanics, so you setup a physical prototype to observe. Let's say you are developing a multi-player role-playing game that mimics a typical field-based sports game, but you intend on focusing player actions on secretive instructions given to the player motion and actions on the field against each other. You could setup teams of people and instruct the rules to let them play it out to see what kind of strategies they employ. These can inform AI or improvements in strategic controls within the game.
The playable prototype is usually the first digital prototype and might even form the base for the final game. Early playable prototypes are all about trying to model the core game activity players will do. Remember, games are about what players do, so this means focusing early digital prototypes on the game’s actions. The key is to keep it rough and ugly here. Use simple shapes and colors to represent elements in the game, and focus your time and energy on the actual play experience. The entire point is to explore basic mechanics, basic actions, basic decisions to see if the overall concept of the game is working.
Another form of prototyping is art and sound prototypes. The playable prototype may not have final sound or art, using simple placeholders. However, art and sound prototypes can be developed in tandem to explore ideas around the visuals and the sounds of the game. These are more like traditional art direction approaches found in graphic design, application development, and animation. Art prototypes focus on things like the color palette, the typography, the illustration or modeling style—all the things that fit under the “look and feel” of a game. Often, one member of the team is working on the playable prototype while other team members are working on art prototypes. Macklin, Colleen; Sharp, John. Games, Design and Play (Game Design) (pp. 190-191). Pearson Education. Kindle Edition.
Art or sound prototypes typically are fairly bounded in scope and are designed to test out ideas before too much time is spent developing everything for the game. This could be a distortion effect for NPCs voices or sound effect and soundtrack blending effects during dialog to get the overall volume balance correct.
Interface prototypes address the way the player interacts with the game. Is there a heads-up display? Is there a custom controller or an unusual use of a traditional controller? Interface prototypes explore ideas relating to how a player directly engages with the game. Macklin, Colleen; Sharp, John. Games, Design and Play (Game Design) (p. 193). Pearson Education. Kindle Edition.
To explore interface prototyping you can learn a ton from wire-framing and design principles for web and application development. Best-practices and prototypes are huge in the user-experience UX industry.
As you move through early prototyping by considering the gameplay, art, sound, and interface, you might also need to begin testing technologies and beginning to write code. Once you have developed the playable prototype, you will also want to consider technologies for the larger game. Maybe you want to see how the basic code performs on a couple of machines, for example. Or perhaps you want to check the input/output to a server. This sort of prototype is a code prototype. Code prototypes are likely to be internal prototypes as well, to work out infrastructure necessary for more complete tests of your game.
Technical and code prototypes can also help home in on the best game engine to use or on the right input devices or physical elements (if any) for the game. In some cases, the game might use a piece of technology that is new or unfamiliar. In this case, trying it out early on to get a good sense of whether it will be appropriate to the game is key. Macklin, Colleen; Sharp, John. Games, Design and Play (Game Design) (p. 194-195). Pearson Education. Kindle Edition.
Once things start coming together around the playable prototype, it is time to move toward a core game prototype: a prototype that includes the core game experience.4 It is different from the playable prototypes in that it isn’t just focused on one or two aspects of the game: it brings all the core parts together to see how the whole feels and plays. At this stage, adding some basic art and sound design can be helpful to identify how they will be integrated into the experience. Also, it’s time to include rough placeholders for some of the game content, writing, and any intro sequences or tutorial elements. Macklin, Colleen; Sharp, John. Games, Design and Play (Game Design) (p. 195). Pearson Education. Kindle Edition.
After a couple of rounds of core game prototypes and playtests, you are likely ready to move onto a complete game prototype. A complete game prototype includes all aspects of your game: menus, start screens, all the actions and objects in place, and the game able to be played through from start to finish. With the other kinds of prototypes, we emphasize making quick prototypes that aren’t perfectly built. With complete game prototypes, work fast and remember that it doesn’t need to be perfect until the production phase. That said, paying attention to how things come together with more of an eye toward the final build of the game helps. Macklin, Colleen; Sharp, John. Games, Design and Play (Game Design) (p. 197). Pearson Education. Kindle Edition.
So as a summary for this module, you should have a firm grasp that prototypes are to test hypothesis, mechanics, and ideas AS you build your game. The purpose of prototypes is to have something to ask questions of players and get feedback, answers, insight, and wisdom as to how to adjust your plans or not.
The outcome of this step is to have something that you can provide to others to play/interact with, to get your questions answered
For this weeks assignment you are going to create a couple of prototypes for your game concept you developed last module. There is a list of 8 types of prototypes above, but there are others out there as well. For this assignment you need to:
1 Look at your game concept and determine a minimum of 2 questions you have about game mechanics, player actions, rules, interface, controls, etc. that you can prototype out and test.
2 Develop the appropriate prototypes to test those ideas and produce those prototypes in preparation for player tests next week.
3 Utilize the most effective medium to submit your prototypes for this weeks assignment. Can be photos of physical or paper prototypes, a video recording/screen capture of the prototype, etc. You know the formats by now. Follow them.
4 Click on Final Project - Prototyping in the UNM Learn Assignments Listing.
5 Scroll down to Assignment Files and Browse Local file to select the file you created and attach it to your submission for this assignment.
Please make sure you also complete the other requirements in your todo list like discussion post and quiz. Don't forget those.