Let's continue our discussion on prototypes by exploring Gameplay Prototypes. The Gameplay Prototype is primarily the tool of the game design team. Game Playing Prototype should test some aspect of the design without focusing on visual aesthetics or the implementation details. This is where game design gets real. The design process moves beyond idea generation and documentation to what I consider as the most important skill of a good game designer. For example, I worked on the game back in the early 2000s called mud craft. We started with the idea for creating a real time strategy game using the resources of dirt and water to create mud. Early ideation led to a high concept statement. Once we had the high concept statement for the game we started to prototype the game, not using digital tools but using paper and pencil to start, more on this soon. So how do you build a gameplay prototype? The first step is to think and plan. As we have discussed, the design play experience framework can help with this. That is, you should start by thinking of the goals of the game experience. Then think about the design elements that you can create to achieve those experience goals. As an example, let's pretend that we're working on Mario Kart before it exists. What is the experience of the Mario Kart game we want to create?. And how do we design elements to achieve this experience? For example we can start with the experience calls for the game, we can then work backwards to make sure our experience goals are being met through the play and the design. So for example, we want the player to feel they are never out of the race to achieve this we want to create a negative feedback loop in the play experience. That is the player that is winning gets penalized during the race while the player that is behind gets rewarded to help them catch up. This translates into the design mechanic of the Powerup system in the game. Where the player in front gets powerups that are less powerful than the powerups that the players get in the back. Thereby creating the negative feedback loop leading to the experience of never feeling like you're out of the race. We talked about this rubber banding effect back in our lecture on game balancing. You can see some of the other experience calls listed and how the play or design elements lead to this experience. Okay it's time for you to get busy now. I want you to take a few minutes to think about the experience of your game. And what design elements help you achieve the goals? To document this, I want you to create a design play experience table for your game similar to the one that I created for Mario Kart pause the video now and perform this step for your game. Okay, with the design play experience table in hand. You are now ready to create a gameplay prototype. So you can test the design that you just drafted to see if you're achieving the experience goals through playtesting. So how do we do this? Well, there are many ways to actually build gameplay prototypes, including digital prototypes, and physical prototypes. A digital prototype is a prototype made in software. You can prototype gameplay, use a number of digital tools. For example, you can use tools like PowerPoint, Game Maker, Twine, Level editors from other games or even a game engine like Unity. The point is that this early prototype does not have to be created in the engine or platform you plan to build the game upon. The goal is to rapidly test the design to determine if it's worth investing the time and energy to build an actual, playable prototype. A disadvantage to going digital at this early stage is that it may require some technical skills, such as programming. Some art skills and a substantial investment of time to build the prototype. So it may not be the best choice at this early stage of the design process. At the early stages of design physical prototypes are often best, as they take much less time to create and iteration upon, and you care a lot less when things don't work out. That is they are much more disposable than a digital prototype. Paper and pencil is usually enough to get started prototyping but you can also use things like dice, cards, figurines, coins or whatever you might have on hand to help pull together your paper prototype. This is where it is helpful to have a good understanding a board and card games because board and card games can be viewed as very polished gameplay prototypes. But of course, the goal is not to create a polished board game. It is to create a quick and dirty gameplay prototype for testing. For example, here's a gameplay prototype of Mario Kart using just color index cards with simple illustrations and words on them and a set of dice. Once again, the goal of the physical prototype is to test a design element of your game to see if you're achieving the experience goals you have defined not necessarily reproduce the entire experience of the game. So going back to he design play experience table I made for Mario Cart, you can see several of the design elements here. Notably, we have the road challenge represented by the green card stack. The cards that are laid out represent the race track. The first piece of the track is shown on the left, and the next upcoming piece of the track is shown on top of the deck. That is the piece of the track that toad can see coming up. The white cards are the fun-loving Mario Universe characters that are on the game. As shown Toad is in the lead, followed by Yoshi, Mario, Bowser, and then Princess. The blue cards are the player controls actions or verbs in the game. You can see things like steer for navigating a tough section of the track. Accelerate for speeding through an easy section of the track and dodge for dodging an obstacle. The yellow cards represent the power ups that are available on a given section of the track. The players have the ability to pick these up and use them. And there's an element of chance in the game, which in the gameplay prototype was simulated through a dice roll. For example, on the hard section of the track that Mario is upon, he must roll a seven or a higher not to crash. All the details of the gameplay prototype are not important for sake of our discussion here. But you can see many of the elements of the design are represented. This prototype took about 15 minutes to pull together. With it in hand, we could start to play test the game to determine if we're getting at the experience goals we laid out for the game. If not, we can quickly throw out cards and draw up new ones. Obviously, this game play prototype is nothing like the actual digital game of Mario Kart, but it is a tool that could be used early on, to work through some of the design elements. You can envision creating a gameplay prototype with a more direct relationship to the actual game using something like, matchbox cars and track pieces. If you went this route, you would just use whatever cards that you had on hand to represent the characters. And rather than layout actual track, you might just draw one on a large piece of paper. The point is to get something as quickly as possible that you can start to play test. And you don't have to limit yourself to paper. You can also use the physical world to prototype your game experience. So you can imagine testing out aspects of Mario Kart at an actual go-kart racing location. If you're making a game about anything that borders on a real life experience it makes sense to try to really understand what in that experience makes it fun, and what elements we can capture in a digital game. Going to the real world might be the best way to do this. Okay, for the next step of the activity, think about how to map the game as defined by your design play experience table into a physical prototype. How can you create a physical prototype a part or all of your game rapidly so you can start testing toward the experience goals. Pause the video now and think about this. If you really want to challenge yourself, create an actual physical gameplay prototype. But that likely would take some time, so at least take a few minutes to think about how you would do it. [MUSIC]
