Prototyping is exciting; it is one of the most creative and engaging aspects of game development. There are so many possibilities, especially at the start of prototyping – it usually gets many people on the team involved and shows lots of progress in a short amount of time compared to the rest of the game dev cycle. With all this awesomeness – how does one execute well and build effective prototypes?

What is a Prototype?

While a ‘prototype’ can be defined in different ways; I am defining it as something you can interact and ‘play’ with; it is not something that you have to use your imagination to experience. Interestingly, an effective prototype can spark your imagination about what it can become, only an incomplete prototype will have players ask ‘what is this for’?

Why Prototype?

In my experience, well executed prototyping is the cornerstone of making great games. There is a purity to them; both creating, and experiencing them that sparks excitement and imagination amongst team members; an effective prototype can also lead to further exploration that can expand the game.

Game Example

To provide additional context with examples, I’m going to pretend we are making an ‘Action RPG’ in the vein of the Diablo series.

Confirm/Deny

Prototypes can be used for different reasons; but prototypes are most effective when you want to ‘prove’, and by extension ‘disprove’ something; a nugget of gameplay, a loop, a feeling. This is what they do best – they provide clarity and data: they expand your mind about possibilities that hadn’t been considered; but also can prove existing hypotheses that an idea is flawed.

Knowing for sure that something doesn’t work is almost as valuable as something that does; it allows you to close the book on certain ideas and conversations that can drain team energy.

Define your Goals

Starting a prototype without proper preparation will generally end in failure; it wastes time and won’t get you good results.

• Be specific about what you want to prove. Having vague goals will lead to vague results. The more specific you are, the better the evaluation process goes.
• Be succinct with your goals: It’s much better to write half as much documentation, and spend twice as much time creating and refining the prototype. An old saying in the industry is: we don’t ship documents, we ship games
• Focus on what you want to achieve, rather than what you want to avoid. This simply leads to better results; a strong proposal, clearer and easier to evaluate goals, and better communication. Like in any sport: ‘Trying to win’ is much more effective than ‘trying to avoid losing’.

EXAMPLE GOAL 1: ‘Make Killing Enemies feel satisfying’

EXAMPLE GOAL 2: ‘Provide a Clear way to Compare Weapon Statistics’

EXAMPLE GOAL 3: ‘Provide a Clear way to Equip/Unequip Skills’

Results not Processes

While making games (especially larger ones with bigger teams) requires processes to match their size, what matters most with prototyping is the results you achieve with a playable, (and the speed at which you got there) not the completeness of processes you followed.

Pare down your ‘rules’ as much as you can to serve only your goals and get to the faster results. If you end up creating a mess of code or to achieve the prototype, don’t worry: rebuilding the results of a prototype for full production with proper processes after a ‘messy’ prototype phase always takes less time than starting with the processes from the start.

Follow the Fun

You’ll probably come to a point where things happened along the way to make you question your original goals. You tested your assumptions and proved or disproved some things, but you’re not satisfied yet: This is great, it’s part of a healthy process.

Where do you go from here? To which direction do you pivot? By what metrics and objectives do you abide by?

By following the ‘fun’. While ‘fun’ is a nebulous term that many smart people have devoted entire books to, you should always point your compass towards the joy that players are experiencing. If there are more joyful elements, put more effort towards them, while reducing effort towards elements that detract, or provide no joy. That’s it. Avoid ego, assumptions and personal preferences as much as you can in this phase. Remember: there are many ways to get to the same result; focus on the end result, not on specific details.

While we may worry about honesty in our communications with others, everyone has an innate ability to know what they like and what they don’t. 

I’ve never seen a problem with this aspect of prototyping. There’s generally consensus too – when you show a number of people your prototype, even with different backgrounds and preferences, there invariably will be obvious threads of agreement about what’s right and wrong with the prototype. Where you will find much more disagreement is what steps to take to fix it.

See Through the Smoke

The reason for this is that testing and reviewing prototypes requires a different kind of thinking and evaluation than final products. This seems obvious, but can often be overlooked.

Finished games have been polished a lot – some more than others, but rarely is the ‘1st draft’ of a feature being played by players. By definition, a prototype is that ‘1st draft’ – it has almost 0 polish.

This can lead to judging it by ‘completed’ eyes, rather than ‘imagining’ ones. Often players are comparing the prototype to ‘completed’ experience they have in their mind’s eye.

If you are hearing the same negative feedback about a specific element, polish just enough to overcome the friction that can hamper your goals, no more

EXAMPLE FEEDBACK 1: ‘I don’t understand when I’m near death’

EXAMPLE FEEDBACK 2: ‘I don’t understand when my Skills’ cooldowns are complete’

Why not continue to polish it more if people are requesting it? Because If you are able to get to a nugget of ‘joy’ while the whole is unpolished, and people are already enjoying it, how much will they like it once it’s polished?

Avoiding Pitfalls

While there are generally no bad pathways to prototyping if you are following the above rules, sometimes there’s a reason why a certain idea ‘hasn’t even been done before’ – it’s because it’s not a great idea. This isn’t to say that new ideas aren’t possible – there are new games in new genres being created all the time.

That being said, I’ve found that staying honest about what I am trying to accomplish and having respect for the 50 years of video game history that have come before me yields the best results.

After all, we are standing on the shoulders of giants and the more acceptance of that fact the greater chance you have to understand what will work and what won’t, and ultimately the more effective your prototypes will be.

Conclusion

Prototyping is a compelling exercise; compared to the rest of game production, the feedback loop is short and gets more people on the team involved. I hope that the above steps help you in achieving your prototyping goals.