How to Prototype a Game in Under 7 Days (by the World of Goo people) | Hacker News Reader

How to Prototype a Game in Under 7 Days (by the World of Goo people)

gamasutra.com

104 pointspchristensen11 comments

This is a great article. Of all the smart people I've worked with, Kyle Gabler is probably the only one I would call a genius. The fact that he can also articulate the way he works is a nice benefit for the rest of us.

Little known fact: Kongregate and 2D Boy both operated out of Kyle's apartment for our first year. We all left EA at the same time and were going to have a game studio together but then I had the idea for Kongregate and tried to get Ron and Kyle to do that with me. They stuck to their guns, with great results.

Hey there, were you a coworker of Kyle's at EA? A fellow game graphics programmer from Rockstar Games here.

I remember Kyle mostly from his days as a comic artist at my alma mater, Univ. of Virginia. I was a comic artist and editor several years after Kyle graduated but I still remember his work from my freshman year. It was a comic called Drool and was a very morbid comic but hilarious if you're into that kind of thing. It was much better than most of what comes out of xkcd and other fluffy nerd comics. I believe it was canned after Kyle ran a Jesus joke that rubbed some people wrong. The artwork in World of Goo comes directly from his old work.

I would point you to a URL of his stuff if it weren't for the fact that our school newspaper's website hasn't been fully functional since my roommate who maintained it graduated :(

Here's a decent article on Gabler from back in the day: http://www.virginia.edu/insideuva/2003/11/gabler_kyle.html although it doesn't display any of his work. My roommate was managing editor last year for the CD and he likes to brag about the new site they have, but apparently it's not working at the moment.

drool and other work of his: http://kylegabler.com/oldsite/contents/art/index.html

It's little tid-bits like these that make Hacker News so great. My boys and I use Kongregate for family fun time since I'm in grad school and flash games are the right price for our budget (Although I put in a request with Santa for World of Goo and a $10 registration for Incredible Machines) having founders turn up to comment on articles is just cool.

I also like the think about how much better a place the world is now that thousands of people everyday get pointed to the best new games, rewarding quality, generating revenue for good developers. That's a whole lot of utility generated in a very "sustainable" way. All from one apartment.

Related to this is http://www.ludumdare.com -- a game design orientated competition that has been running since 2002.

You get 48 hours to make a game from scratch (art, code, everything) to a theme voted on weeks before, and chosen 0 minutes before the competition starts. These are the same elements which the Experimental Gameplay project copied.

There you can see a journal from all the entrants, as well as source code -- so you can learn how the better game makers approach it.

Many game developers use it as a chance to prototype games, and get immediate feedback as you develop. Also to help you refine your skills to allow you to make games more rapidly.

It's a real buzz to enter the competition, as there's often 100 or so people working on their games at the same time.

Since it's from scratch, you are forced to finish things up, rather than working on engines(for you web dev people engines are the frameworks of game development).

If you're into making games I highly recommend you join in on one of these competitions :)

Kyle Gabler and Kyle Gray are awesome. Of interest to HC, Gabler went the indie route, while Gray stayed inside EA but maneuvered politically to control his own indie-sized team. I help organize the Independent Games Summit every year at the Game Developer's Conference; last year we had them do a "A Tale of Two Kyles" talk. The conference wasn't recording video, sadly, but there are some writeups available. One is here: http://www.gamedev.net/columns/events/gdc2008/article.asp?id...

2D Boy is speaking at this year's IGS with a numbers-focused talk, sharing the success of World of Goo from a business standpoint.

Are there any tips on the technical side of prototyping a game in 7 days? I'm guessing most of these games are done in Flash, is there anything more to it than that?

Actually I want to say they were all windows apps, but I could be wrong. Prototyping anything doesn't mean using the new whiz bang language, it means using whatever you know. html+javascript, flash, sed, java, lisp, C++, it doesn't matter. It is about finding out if the idea works or not.

For a fun side story I wrote the original search engine for toybin.org in sed :)

The 'make the toy' first is probably the most powerful tip.

If you like this stuff check this out:

http://chrishecker.com/Advanced_Prototyping

Edit: OK, this time I succumbed to karma whoring and posted it as a news item; make any comments in that page:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=409861

Reply on news.ycombinator.com