Somewhat related, I designed and created the prototype for my tabletop game Burger Up[1] in around 2 hours, including an hour with scissors and pencils, drawing rough sketches of burger ingredients on cardboard (with lots of help in that area from my partner), the night before a playtest/pitch session with a publisher.
Once the publisher picked it up, many hours of playtesting and many iterations followed (although once we cut it back to "what made it fun" it ended up surprisingly close to the original foundation).
I think that unless you're doing something completely groundbreaking, people who operate in that space can see the potential in a prototype/MVP and can visualize what it will look like with improved assets, etc quite easily. If the core isn't "fun" then you don't have anything (yet).
As someone who came from making video games and now I'm working towards getting my first board game published, I like the prototype process of board games a lot more. One reason is because it is SOOOO much faster and easier to prototype a board game than a video game.
Need to try a new mechanic? Tell your players "okay, this time, instead of doing this we will do this." And five seconds later you're trying a new mechanic. You don't have to spend hours or days rewiring a bunch of things to get it to work. Sometimes it just takes a sticker on a card and things get changed.
Need some components for your game? You don't have to create them, or search for the right thing in unity asset packs. Open up one of your existing board games that has cubes or discs or dice or meeples or whatever and you can start trying your idea out in five minutes.
It's great, and it's hard to go back to the comparatively much slower process with video games afterwards.
Video games still kick the pants off board games when it comes to ease of distribution and sales channels for small developers, though.
Can anyone give some kind of update on how things have changed in the past decade since this was written, and thoughts about what resources to go to as a result? That might be really helpful and received with love and gratitude from readers here.
This article focuses mostly on design and the principles of rapidly prototyping a game, and I would say very little has changed in those areas over the years.
Something that has changed is the available tools for rapid game development. Ludum Dare is a regularly occurring game jam (next one starts Aug 26), and their tools page is a good resource:
http://ludumdare.com/compo/tools/
Somewhat unrelated, but a lot has also changed in the commercial market for indie games since this was written. On one hand, it has gotten much easier to commercially distribute indie games. But on the other hand, there is much, much more competition in this space now.
I second that. A dev I spoke to basically said that the indie dev scene before (distribution-wise) was really tough because the only way to distribute games on a mass scale was through big box stores (with actual physical copies). A lot of these stores rarely, if ever, dealt with smaller studios (let alone one-man shops) so you would have to make deals with publishers (like EA) just to get your games on those shelves. Those publishers then took a large cut of all the revenue.
If your game was somehow a success, you had to keep making bigger games with a bigger team just so you can make that game 'relevant' to the big box stores. It's a never-ending cycle of needing to keep growing, expanding, and eventually that financial pressure swallows up indie studios. Nowadays, you have digital distribution channels like Steam or itch.io which make it significantly 'easier' to reach customers. Plus, there's less pressure to grow unless you want to. Like erik said though, there's definitely more competition nowadays.
I will say this though as someone who writes about games, a unique hook (ie in mechanics, story, tech, or maybe all of them) goes a long way in getting press to write about you. I suppose that's the way it is with other fields though.
As a writer, I love discovering and covering new indie games. I want to write about you but if you scroll through a lot of these games, it feels like stuff we've seen again and again. The one game that changes the formula even for a little or presents it in a novel way (ie Undertale or Her Story), you get people really interested and talking about it.
Prototyping in unity is not as fast as flash back in the day (for me at this time anyways). Can anyone compare GameMaker: Studio or another modern product that is good for fast prototyping?
GameMaker is usually the go to recommendation for rapid prototyping, and game development at a higher level of abstraction than Unity.
I've lately been hearing some positive buzz around Godot, particularly for 2D games. But I also get the impression that there is a learning curve.
https://godotengine.org/
If you want to bring your flash skills into the modern world, Haxe might be worth looking at:
http://haxe.org/ particularly with a framework like OpenFL. http://www.openfl.org/
I didn't get involved in flash dev back in the day, but last year I switched my primary game dev product to GameMaker: Studio. The ease of rapid prototyping was the largest factor. I believed in it so much I bought the whole professional bundle.
My thoughts after half a year or so are as follows:
- it's very flexible, between the drag n drop functionality and plain writing scripts or inline code for object events. You can mix and match, too.
- the syntax is also pretty flexible, c-ish or javascript-ish.
- the IDE has a lot of nice integrated features, like being able to whip up sprites directly in there. Good for rapid prototypes and removing context switching.
- the most challenging part has been learning the command set. The old "I know what I want to do, just not the magic words to make it happen". Online tutorials seem to cover a lot of the same ground, and the help is good but verbose enough that searching for simple terms related to what you want to do can return more results than is feasible to weed through.
- for me, the most difficult portion is in debugging code, especially if it's and asset I haven't written (there's a marketplace where I've purchased things to learn from or speed up prototyping). There's no good way to view all the code from objects/events in one place, so trying to find where a variable is getting set can be a bit of hunting. I find myself using Agent Ransack to find all instances of a given text within my project. This can be mitigated somewhat by coding style, consistency, and naming conventions, but I find as a project grows in complexity it becomes more of an issue. For a simple example, I had a pong prototype where I was increasing the puck speed every time it bounced off a paddle. But should the code for that be on the puck's collision event with a paddle, or a paddle's collision event with a puck?
Overall, I'm very happy with my choice. I think in the first week of owning it I was able to recreate (at least to a prorotype level, if not more) almost all of my previous game projects. Literally years of work in various languages.
As a final remark, I had stayed away from GameMaker in the past due to the name. Sounded like it was more of a toy than a usable environment. I wont't make that mistake again :) Check out their website to see some of the games made in it. You might be surprised, I know I was.
A lot of this simply isn't true, though. For instances, many games' source of fun comes not just from gameplay mechanics but the richness of its composition. When you take away the design of assets or the particular sounds or music that a game is made up of, you have an entirely different game.
Too many people in gamedev are fooled by this concept. If anyone could make Minecraft and make it just as fun, why don't other voxel-based games ever seem just as fun?
What's fundamentally the difference between CS, CS:S, and CS:GO? Surely they're all the same game since the mechanics haven't changed dramatically.
The first image still has lots of details in it. I've seen prototypes where everything was either black or green, no gradients no nothing - even the main character was a square!
This reminds me of some very early prototype screenshots from Path of Exile that they released a while ago (long after everything was polished and prettified).
The guys from DrinkBox Studios have recently published the first pitch video from their current game Severed that was sent around internally after they finished their last game. That’s also an example for a huge leap from concept/idea to finished product.
The core essence of a video game is the game feel (which not everyone likes, because it's ill-defined). How does a player interact with a game? Via game mechanics. No amount of polish is going to make up for horrible game mechanics.
Jan Willem (of Vlambeer), who hates the phrase "game feel", talks about it through a simple iterative process of improving game mechanics. See: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AJdEqssNZ-U
That isn't true. No sane company will polish a game before knowing for certain the gameplay mechanics and art direction are final. It just costs incredible amounts of money to pivot at that point so nobody does it.
Heck the projects that yielded the best games where I previously worked at were those who'd iterate like crazy on the prototype until they get down the gameplay mechanics, then throw it all away and start developing the real game sitting on that knowledge.
Polish will make a game better but it won't make it go from boring to fun.
It's a half truth. You can be sitting at a plateau in terms of how the game is percieved until you add a key piece of tech or a particular asset. Ideally, you can prove 100% of the concept in a preproduction state, where everything is functional but placeholder. That is not hard to achieve at small scopes. Sometimes you end up needing to go a little farther, though, as the aesthetics do make a tangible difference. It takes good design skills to know how well developed the concept is, and for really tech-driven stuff you have to try building it to understand it.
That said, it also depends on what elements are critical to the design goals. If you're driven by writing, you had better already have a novel or two of drafts already written before you sink any budget into it. If you're going for a tight set of action mechanics, expect to spend a long time looking at a prototype with a bunch of colored shapes.
There are many stories of wasted work in AAA, and a lot of it stems from being too hasty to pull the trigger on production and expecting the people making work at final quality to pull rabbits out of hats and fill in a lot of missing blanks as they go along, only to be sent back to the start for a retake of entire scenes.
Eeeeeh, "final" is such a strong word. They won't (or shouldn't) spend much time polishing assets before they've sufficiently tested out (and polished) the core gameplay. But yeah, they shouldn't invest too much until they're confident that the game's going in the right direction.
That game went through so many revisions and prototypes. I remember playing an early version which was just a HL2 mod, barely resembling the current incarnation.
Point and click adventure games seem like a good example - the mechanics for these are usually a pretty small part of what makes them fun. Awesome and polished art, sound, plot etc. are what matter.
Good assets can't polish turd. A solid core, however, can benefit from assets. They mention this point in the article.
A better counter argument would be a game which was completely abstract, hence not fun, being made fun with content.
So in counterstrike, if you were abstract blobs, the goal might be confusing, and not fun. But your not, you either want to blow up, or save, a building (assets assist communication.)
Good assets sold turds at the beginning of most previous console cycles. This is likely a thing of the past, in this new era of vastly diminishing visual returns for dollars spent. Hitting that top-tier of fidelity that previously was able to ship games on screenshots alone is now so hideously expensive that few publishers are willing to risk it.
If you remove all of the sounds from Minecraft, all of the textures, all of the composite models and replace them with wireframe hitboxes, I doubt you'd have something as fun as the hit title.
Prototypes are not good indicators that something could be fun.
I played a very early build of Minecraft, when Notch posted it to an IRC channel I frequented at the time. It had primitive but recognizable voxel graphics, and almost no features. But the basic principles of exploration and building were there.
I can tell you with certainty that very early and unpolished prototypes of Minecraft were fun, and that the potential was obvious. (Though of course no one could predict just how huge Minecraft became.)
That's completely false and grossly overlooks what makes games fun in the first place.
Prototypes are your absolute best indicators to determine if a project is worth investing into to reach completion or not. Because you find your fun factor at the prototype level.
You'll get at most better visuals, sounds and more balance in the game with polish. If your mechanics aren't fun to begin with, polishing them will do absolutely no good.
> I doubt you'd have something as fun as the hit title.
I doubt it too.
> Prototypes are not good indicators that something could be fun.
This is what I disagree with. The prototype won't be as fun as the final product (because otherwise, why bother polishing in the first place?).
Take Infiniminer, an obvious source of inspiration for Notch. It's only got the very minimum of features; it's kind of a Minecraft prototype. It's also got the features that originally got me into Minecraft: building arbitrary structures in a large virtual environment. Minecraft is better fleshed out, of course, but the core of the game is there.
There's going to be a point where you've got the irreducible kernel of a game concept. That is the prototype. Remove items, crafting, mobs, infinite world sizes, lighting, and textures from Minecraft, and you've still got the kernel: a virtual building kit. It's an awesome idea, fun on its own, and expandable into a "real" game with goals, achievements, etc. It's a great indicator that a fleshed-out version of the game may be fun.
Now, you can't build something smaller than a kernel of the concept, call it the prototype, and make a judgement based on that.
At the beginning, yes. The beginning alpha/demo version was. Infiniminer was like the prototype, and the demo was like the engine reimplementation when it was at the same level of development, when the previous dev team quit and deleted the original source tree (not literally true; I'm speaking figuratively).
It was a clone with aspirations of becoming something greater.
I think at some point you have to use your imagination and intuition to fill in the gaps. This is something you have to do at many stages of the process anyway right? A prototype let's you confirm that your basic ideas are sound and you can focus on imagining the other aspects that bring it all together.
> why don't other voxel-based games ever seem just as fun
But this is the opposite of your point. Other games resemble Minecraft superficially and maybe offer some crafting, but none have anything like Minecraft's deep mechanics.
Minecraft hits the right notes to by psychologically satisfying, too. The feedback the player receives for thier decisions makes the initial parts of the game exciting.
You feel validated for expressing yourself, much like a strategy in Counter Strike or picking a team in Pokémon.
For some reason I misread this title as "How to Prototype a Game in under 7 seconds" and I was like, FINALLY!! Someone gets the web. I was so ready to click and spend not just 7 seconds but 30, 60, 90, 120, hell, 20 minutes if that's what it took.
Imagine my disappointment when it turned into 7 days.
This article is on the right track. But "Rapid is a State of Mind" can be a state of mind.
I am exaggerating with the 7 seconds - but only a little. People need to go much farther in the direction that this article, correctly, advocates :)
EDIT: the downvoters are on the wrong side of history and I'm not changing one word.
> People need to go much farther in the direction that this article, correctly, advocates :)
Prove the downvoters wrong, and build some awesome 7-second games. It hasn't been done...and so you're seeing skepticism. If it takes you an hour to make something like that, maybe you can have a dozen a day, and maybe 80 per week. Showing off a few dozen decent game prototypes in a week of work (or even just one, running in under an hour and popularly judged worthwhile) would be great.
I would say most programmers working today do not so much as open their programming environment in 7 seconds, that is not the environment that is set up let alone exposed to outsiders, without signup, through a simple URL.
So I am saying that the direction the article advocates is completely correct, yet the maxim "Rapid is a State of Mind" can be taken further, we can think in even more rapid terms. If you can't imagine clicking a URL and immediately creating a game that has never been made before then you're on the wrong side of history. I am simply not going to elaborate. (The 7 seconds is a bit of an exaggeration, as I noted.)
You definitely should elaborate. Right now what you're saying has absolutely no substance and only reminds me of the Dunning-Kruger effect.
One thing I learned long ago is that people who are cocksure of themselves yet won't explain anything are almost always the ones on the wrong side of history yet are completely oblivious to the fact.
if you really want to, set aside about three minutes, try tinkercad and model a 3d object that is ready to 3d print and has never existed before, no installation required, and then come back and tell me how a similar level of simplicity would never be exposed by anyone anywhere to make it possible for non-programmers to create and publish a game in a few seconds.
your talk about being cocksure and obliviousness is dangerously close to a personal attack, so unless you make a constructive reply I think this conversation is over.
Oh I meant that I myself was exaggerating when I said it would literally take 7 seconds from clicking a URL to creating a game that hasn't existed ever before. (as in, count off "click -- one mississippi...two mississippi...three mississippi...four mississippi...five mississippi...six mississippi...seven mississippi - and now you have a game that has never existed and is ready to publish in the app store and for someone else to play." 7 seconds is quite a bit too short for that - after all it's acceptable for the web app itself to take that long just to load.
Just like it takes literally more than 7 seconds to start using tinkercad and create a new 3D object. but not much more. try it: https://www.tinkercad.com/
maybe not within 7 seconds, but after a few minutes (couple of tutorials) you can have an object nobody has made before. no installation or any prior knowledge required.
the same obviously will be true of gaming, this is the direction the Internet is headed. if you can't see it, oh well. it's not my vision or anything like that, it's just what is actually going to exist, or maybe already does. I don't see it being too fruitful for us to argue about this, sorry.
Once the publisher picked it up, many hours of playtesting and many iterations followed (although once we cut it back to "what made it fun" it ended up surprisingly close to the original foundation).
I think that unless you're doing something completely groundbreaking, people who operate in that space can see the potential in a prototype/MVP and can visualize what it will look like with improved assets, etc quite easily. If the core isn't "fun" then you don't have anything (yet).
[1] https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/186701/burger