Comments on: Why Prototyping is so important in game development

By: Emme

Emme — Fri, 04 Feb 2011 02:34:27 +0000

Well, there should be milestones, actually.When You are game prototyping You don’t think about sugar coating and cherry, You cram in the very basic gameplay and test that until its the best fun You can offer.Throw out everything that makes the game not better (can be hard sometimes).You cant put TOO MUCH time in the protoype, simply because if You fail at spotting the weak parts, those might remain in there til release.

By: Utkarsh Upadhyay

Utkarsh Upadhyay — Sat, 22 Jan 2011 13:18:52 +0000

Nice article!I agree with the fun behind prototyping and I think that the benefits of Prototyping you describe apply to all branches of software development. However, there is a pitfall involved, which also I think applies across all software development.The problem is of putting too much time and effort into the first prototype and making it a little too good. 1. It makes others want to urge you to continue development on the Prototype rather than starting again. 2. They are sometimes one’s dev partners who do not know how the code is _really_ written, and as you point out, it might be sometimes one’s senior who does not want to redo something which already works, but most importantly,3. Sometimes it one’s own maternal affection to a couple of lovely _tricks_ pulled in the code.So though the prototype was made with the purpose of only testing and trying the new ideas, working too long on it will inevitably make it find its way into the final product.Personally, I have found scheduling actual code writing _before_ starting with advanced features very helpful. My cycles are:i. 1 month of prototyping, throwing all features I can at it and having plenty of funii. Freezing the prototype and two/three months of making it into a stable milestone, rolling up my sleeves and ‘paying’ for that month of fun.iii. Starting with this stable base for another month of fun filled prototyping, repeat …However, I have not done game development myself. Will these sort of cycles work there? Or are there no stable milestones until the last feature is in?~musically_ut

By: joe

joe — Sat, 22 Jan 2011 09:04:14 +0000

¿Hablas español? @JuDelCo was so kind to translate this article into Spanish. Read it here: http://goo.gl/a2lHs

By: Leone Simonetti @9leone

Leone Simonetti @9leone — Sat, 22 Jan 2011 05:10:01 +0000

I totally agree with your article.I had some similar experiences, i tried to program a game (worst idea ever for an artist) and the first version of the code was very very dirty, but was enough to see the who would be the gameplay, i could call that prototype, and after i made a code more clean. but i stopped because i got stucked in programing : Tanyway, good article!