designers journal

Yesterday and today, Jeff and I are doing a design jam for Outbreak. Yesterday three people came by to talk to us and see our direction. The question I asked myself at the end of that was. What is the value of documentation during rapid prototyping? Should people at anytime be able to walk into the room and get a coherent briefing of the game. The answer is of course yes. But how much time do you spend documenting when it could change? Ideally if someone, a producer, were always taking notes, she would always know how a prototype fit into the larger picture. I take this time to write all this because I am trying to balance how much work I put into a prototype when I have people coming in and out the door giving us advice. I rarely have more than 1.5 hours to work on anything without interruption.

A couple strategies I've seen work the best:

• always have a storyboard version of the entire game on paper or in flash (very rough) so you can walk anyone through


• if you have to put time into something, pinpoint the core mechanic and make sure you can play with it


• if it is a new concept people haven't seen use more visuals than words


• just jot a few notes so you don't have to rethink things that are important like goals, variables, win/loss conditions, etc..

At the end of our time yesterday, I showed Jeff games from the Experimental Gameplay workshop, specifically Tower of Goo. This is an example of games that were built really quickly (4 - 7 days) through the use of rapid prototyping. They gave a presentation titled How to Build a Game in Seven Days! which is summarized on GameSpy.