How to Prototype a Game in Under 7 Days (2005)
gamasutra.com
gamasutra.com
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).
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.
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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.
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?
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/
Here is a good article on the post flash gamedev world: http://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/LarsDoucet/20150915/252693/Wh...
I haven't tried any of the above. But I've heard good things about all of them.
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.
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.
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.
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.
You feel validated for expressing yourself, much like a strategy in Counter Strike or picking a team in Pokémon.
If you want to make a Minecraft then prototype that instead a single aspect of its visuals.
"If X is true and Y is X, why is Y false."
The point isn't to have a perfect game at the end of the period, it's to have something to validate further time investment.
Take a look at the game Braid from prototype/concept to finished product.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Braid-art-1.jpg
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Braid-art-2.jpg
This article is about how to get to something like the first image up and running. If it's fun, then work on making it look like the second image.
I bet you could protoype The Stanly Parable in a week in Twine/Z-code.
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.
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.
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
https://p7p4m6s5.ssl.hwcdn.net/public/chris/old/1.jpg
(Source: https://www.pathofexile.com/forum/view-thread/445682)
Pitch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KmFWw3ooDk4
Release Trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CIP35f_SbPI
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.)
Prototypes are not good indicators that something could be fun.
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 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.)
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.
It was a clone with aspirations of becoming something greater.
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.
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.
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.)
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.
If you can't imagine URLs being obsolete by the time that's a reality, then you're on the wrong side of history.
> I am simply not going to elaborate.
Your choice.
> (The 7 seconds is a bit of an exaggeration, as I noted.)
And I was using it in the metaphorical sense, if that wasn't clear. It's as good a phrase as any to mean "very quickly", in the context of the thread.
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.