It doesn't matter if you work in a big company or you are a one-man team. Ideas doesn't fall down from the trees, and success comes with the price of many failures. That's why you will need prototypes! The art of prototyping consist in being able to test ideas better and faster. In this article I will be talking about two things. First I will make an introduction to prototyping and then I will explain why Unity is the ultimate prototyping tool for video games.
While documenting myself before writing this post, I stumbled across many very interesting articles about how to make video game prototypes (written by people with far more experience than me). Here I will comment two of them that I recommend reading.
The first is a rather old post from Gamasutra. How to prototype a game in 7 days is very complete, and has some revealing facts that I never though about before. It focuses on the fact that "Formal Brainstorming Has a 0% Success Rate". The sentence is quite true, but I will talk a little bit more about it later on the post. It also mentions "Nobody Knows How You Made it, and Nobody Cares" witch means that you should be building prototypes maximising outcome, even if that means forgetting about Software Engineering and good programming techniques.
The second article is from devmag.org.za. Rapid Game Prototyping: Tips for Programmers is a more practical guide of what to do and don't. It also has some interesting ideas like: "If a task is not moving you closer to your goal, don’t do it.". Don't waste your time, the only thing that should survive prototyping are ideas, not code. "When you are in the mud, get out of it, and move on". Use all the dirty tricks you know to fake the final idea of game and don't stop on details that burn your time.
Prototype of Northwards of Roswell, still in development. This state was achieved in 2 hours. |