Games Series

Principles of Game Design

Prototyping

Along the way of designing a game, you will get to create many awful looking scribbly draft documents that serve the purpose of exploring ideas in ways that are essentially Fast, Cheap and Disposable, or alternately, Cheap, Ugly and Fast (there are a few different prototyping philosophies but they are pretty similar) — this scribbly mess is the hallmark of a true prototyping design processes.

You don’t want to constantly try to make beautiful precious art with each step along the way to designing your game. You want to perfect the game concept first, and make it pretty to look at later. If the core rules don’t work, then adding extra rules on top of it will generally not make it work. Get the basics working first, before you start adding complexity.

Every successful product has its roots in a concept that was first drawn out on paper and then refined through a series of artistic designs. Development of a product also involves focus groups, marketing, promotion, mass production, and finally market distribution. The same logic applies to games.

To get from the first concept and continue all the way through to the final product in the hands of gamers, Testing and prototyping are invaluable tools. Even after players have begun interacting with a prototype in a live setting, such as a social game or massively multiplayer online game (MMO), the prototyping process remains valuable.

Prototyping subjects a concept to a process of testing and refining that idea. It allows you to test the feasibility and plausibility of a new design, as well as its practicality, originality, marketability, and the X or Wow Factor, before completely investing in its development. Some features or mechanics may be prototyped separately before being integrated, although a fully functional prototype is usually the most helpful, ultimately, where everything is brought together.

Information gleaned from testing prototypes can be sorted in a number of ways, including: things to cut, things to add, problems with the current design, new ideas based on testing, new features based on testing, a potential work-around for development, potential changes to the product’s design, and so on.

Prototyping is a process that will be used in numerous stages of game development. In order to put the game’s concepts to the test, the initial prototyping session will focus on making a simple playable region. The goal is to determine whether or not the concept is entertaining, feasible, or even worth further exploration. It may include things like character designs, weaponry, some basic code, and level designs that are essential to the gameplay of the main concept. Prototyping through several versions illuminates much.

So doing a prototype early on is the most important step. In a game jam setting, prototyping can even serve as a kind of impromptu ideation. A project can be given new life and propelled swiftly past the vaporware stage if actual construction of the product begins rather than just remaining gas words on paper or on the designer’s favorite kind of paper, the ubiquitous Sticky Note.

To prototype a board game game is to go through all the steps of design and development before the game’s final form is reached. The actual production of a board game would include printing everything onto the cardboard stock, mass fabrication of all the individual plastic or metal bits, putting it all into a box, wrapping the box, and so on. You don’t have to do all this production work when you’re just doing board game prototyping.

In the video game business, prototyping can refer to the practice of making something that can be thrown away in order to test out different ideas for game mechanics, programming methods, or artistic and UI design directions. But for some studios, a prototype is also an early working version of the video game that will go through significant revisions on the way to becoming the finished product.

There is a wide variety of prototyping techniques. Storyboarding is common one. It is used to prototype movies in film and animation and can be just as helpful in game development. Storyboarding is sketching out an entire narrative on separate sheets of paper, where each frame captures the essence or key moment of an important scene. An animatic is a video presentation of the storyboards used in the animation and film industries.

Paper vs Digital Prototyping

So, prototyping is a process of designing the product before investing significant time and money into developing the idea, in order to determine whether or not the idea is viable. As a result of the prototyping process, the designer can learn as much as possible about the product without wasting time or money, giving them a better notion of whether or not to go forward with production.

One approach to testing the viability of a new product or concept is to create a paper prototype. It’s also the quickest, most convenient, and least expensive option. Card games, puzzle games, dice games, board games, heads-up displays, user interfaces and buttons on the controller are just some of the game elements that can be prototyped on paper.

To what end, then, is a designer’s paper prototype used? Scissors, paper, a drawing implement (pen, pencil, crayons, pen) and an idea are all that’s required to begin creating. Cardboard, dice, stickers, stencils, glue, markers, graph paper, paint, and any other crafting object they can find can be included if they want even more items to explore with.

One of the key purposes of paper prototyping is to convey a concept as completely and accurately as possible in a short amount of time and with minimal financial outlay. Art supplies, blank playing cards, cardboard hexagons, and play testers are all common items in the designer’s toolkit. Note that play testers are people, not stuff you buy at the art and crafts store! Play testers play with the prototype, and are an essential part of your overall design toolkit. Playtesting may even be recorded and used in presentations.

If you want your paper prototype to look as professional as possible, use your imagination and include as many details as you can. To visually distinguish backdrops, concepts, windows, menus and other components of the prototype, try using colored paper of varying textures and thickness. Simple graphic design ideas like color theory, grid systems and the rule of thirds can be used in the prototype to enhance it through the use of alternative writing and drawing styles. Create a folder system to transport your work in, and apply what you’ve learned about paper prototyping to make a presentation board to demonstrate your prototype to others when things get messy throughout the prototyping process.

More and more people are turning to digital paper prototyping — that’s not a contradiction — which allows them to work on their designs without the need for physical supplies on the go and in any location. With today’s technology, designers may sketch, modify, and rearrange virtual elements at the flick of a finger, make notes on top of the design, and share it with the world in a single click. This will allow them to show off their work to whoever needs to see the enhancements they’ve made, be it testers, designers, producers, or anyone else.

A Game Prototyping Toolkit

If you want to begin creating a prototype of your own board game, you can do it with the equipment listed below. You may divide these up and give each team member charge of a different subset of these low-cost materials.

Standard-sized decks of playing or Uno cards

There is only one go-ahead board.

A chessboard

Dice

A set of polyhedral dice

Notecards and sticky notes of various hues

Beads, trinkety things for craft jewerly

Clock face blanks

The various kinds of light cheap small wooden pieces easily found in a hardware store

Adhesives

A dremel

Ink pens, pencils, markers, colored pencils, and ordinary pens

Paper in various forms, including blank paper, lined paper, card stock, hexagonal graph and grid paper

Clear tape, masking tape, colorful sticky dots, and blank adhesive labels, single & double-sided

Knife, box cutter, or craft knife, cutting mat and scissors

Using parts from several board games purchased from thrift stores and garage sales to use as spare parts and raw materials

When setting out to prototype, get the basics down first. A game’s core mechanics are its bare bones. They are the defining features of the game, the things that could not be changed or removed without fundamentally altering the game’s identity.

The core mechanics of a game serve as the game’s driving force. They are what actually make the game playable. The actions and events that take place turn after turn are shaped by the game’s primary rules and mechanics.

In fact, if you build extra rules on an unstable foundation, the real underlying problems in your design could be obscured! Something might seem wrong, but if there are a lot of systems and resources and game objects it can be hard to tell if you’re experiencing a problem with the core mechanics, or the balance of a particular resource, or the design of the map, or something else.
— (Schreiber, The Early Stages of the Design Process, 2009)

Playtesting

If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.
 — Henry Ford

So, try not to get sidetracked by visual polish too early on in the design process. You’ll end up wasting a lot of time if you do that. Use the bare minimum of artifacts and aesthetic components that nevertheless achieve their intended effects to see if your game is indeed playable (and hopefully entertaining). After play testing has confirmed the gameplay, the development team may shift its focus to the visual design and overall quality of the experience.

A game is play tested when its designers and developers actively engage in the activity to make sure it provides a satisfying experience for players by effectively conveying the game’s goals and mechanics to them, eliminating any potential sources of confusion or frustration, and maximizing the enjoyment of the game for everyone involved.

Even if something seems like a fantastic idea on paper, it may not work out so well in actual use. In its most basic form, play testing consists of literally handing the game to someone and watching them try to play it. This will shed light on many of the false assumptions the developers made during game development, as well as on the items the game’s creators took for granted but which are completely hidden from the player. What needs to be in the tutorial (which shows the player how to use the interface of the game and what they can do in it), what areas could use some more help text, and how the player actually plays the game are all discovered during play testing.

There are numerous types of ways to test prototypes, such as the Kleenex test. In this kind of testing, each tester is used just once before being thrown away, much like a used tissue. This type of testing is useful for determining whether or not the game effectively conveys its mechanics and ideas to the player, as well as for gauging the game’s overall feel and performing related tasks. The value of a tester decreases as soon as they discover how to use the game, therefore they are only employed once. This form of testing looks at how well the game introduces itself to the player and how it explains what will happen next.

Black box testing is another popular method. The tester goes into the game blind, without any prior knowledge of the game’s design, and observes how the game really plays out. This strategy not only helps developers find and fix game-breaking problems, but also gives them valuable insight into how players are actually engaging with the game, which is often very different from how the developers envisioned it being played. Assumptions the team has made about the game can be debunked with the use of black box testing, which should be incorporated into test plans early on. Late in the process, you should do it again to make sure that the tweaks you made reflect how the players actually use the game.

White box testing is another important method of play testing. The players in white box testing have some understanding of how the game is expected to react under specific conditions, and they use test scripts to verify that the game is in fact behaving as the designers planned. Most defects are discovered here, and once they’ve been resolved, the game needs to be tested again (called regression testing) to make sure nothing else was broken in the process.

Load testing is another type of testing used in online and multiplayer games, albeit it is not considered play testing. This style of testing involves a large number of players logging in at once to simulate heavy traffic and verify that the game’s code and server can handle it. After a while, this is completely automated with thousands of virtual players.

Making ensuring players have a good time is more important than performing exhaustive Quality Assurance checks (where you specifically seek for flaws). Good games can’t be made without the information found by Kleenex testers and black box testers. Players won’t enjoy a game if the testers didn’t.

You’ll discover issues with your prototype during playtesting. To avoid wasting time when playing something that you know needs to be altered, it is best to update the game as soon as possible. The board can be annotated, text can be erased and replaced on cards, the number of pieces a player has can be lowered, etc. It’s ok if it all looks like an unsightly mess, as long as there is method in the messiness.

For a game designer, playtesting is the heart of the design process, where they learn what works and what doesn’t about the game’s core mechanics, what sorts of dynamics and imbalances develop, what features need to be added or eliminated, and so on.

While it’s true that playtesting is most effective when done with a small number of individuals who simulate the intended actual gaming, a lot can be accomplished with just one tester. A person’s time is a precious commodity, thus it’s not wise to waste people’s interest by providing them with a subpar product. As a cost-effective alternative, you can conduct playtests with just one person acting in all the roles.

You can find and fix the biggest problems without wasting anybody else’s time until after you’ve gone through a few rounds of solo playtesting.

There are three main purposes of a solo playtest:

Locate gaps in the game that the developer did not think of.

Verify that the gameplay dynamics are functioning as intended by the creator.

Before showing it to another playtester, make as many improvements to the design as you can.

Setting up the game as you would ordinarily play it and taking turns being each player is also a solo playtest.

You can put the game through its paces playing it by yourself. When conducting a solo playtest, it is important to keep in mind some guidelines. Create a list of all the questions and doubts that emerge. Focus on those problems and how to solve them. In games where decisions must be made by the player (which is most of them), you might want to observe what occurs when someone becomes fixated on a single option.

Playtest the game, by yourself, with all potential player counts (two, three, and four) if the game allows multiple player counts. Try to play in a variety of different ways. You can experiment with playing more offensively, more defensively, or with a more balanced approach. Think about leaving certain choices up to luck. Or find a happy medium, by managing probabilities so it stays interesting.

You will learn a lot about the game’s dynamics — the actions a player is encouraged to take — just playing it by yourself.

The goals of playtesting with real people in small groups are related to:

Performing a “sanity test” on the concept of the game to see if it’s actually a good idea worth playing.

Evaluation of the game’s fun factor.

Whether or not it is too easy or too hard to win the game.

Do clear winners and losers emerge rapidly?

What kind of pace does it have, slow or fast?

Understanding the quantitative features of a game, which are crucial to its balance.

Checking how fun and gamelike the experience is by playing through it.

Improve the game’s usability as a whole

In video games, the term “block out” refers to the process of creating the game’s primary spatial and affordance aspects with rough geometries that approximate the game space’s 3D features.

You do all this to make it as enjoyable as possible. In other words, it’s not just supposed to be some kind of tedious grunt labor, of the kind Henry Ford was fond of!

Don’t assume what’s ‘fun’ because fun can be complicated. Various people have various definitions of what constitutes fun. What even is the definition of fun? That which you consider to be fun may not be so for me, and vice versa.

The word “fun” shouldn’t be used naively, as though its meaning were self-evident. Some people would consider sunbathing a worthwhile aesthetic pursuit, while others would find it boring and cancerous. Exactly what sort of “fun” are you hoping to create? For whom is this game supposed to be “fun?” Since the concept of fun is convoluted, it’s explored separately below.

You shouldn’t feel pressured to act on every bit of data generated during playtesting. When you feel it is necessary, you can still put your designer’s instincts above those of the general public. You are looking for responses and details rather than mandates to be carried out. The people you enlist to playtest your game are not likely to be a good representation of your intended demographic or market; they are just the most accessible participants.

The playability of a game refers to how simple it is to pick up and play. It should be easy for newcomers to join part without disrupting the flow of the game, in addition to being fun and sane. It’s important to identify potential roadblocks for new players and clear out any ambiguities that may exist.

Fun

What is fun? Luckily, this is not a psychology class so we don’t have to go too deep into the concept of fun. For now, let’s make gentle toe-dipping gestures into Fun Waters and orient ourselves with a few general ideas that may match your own intuitive conceptions of what counts as fun.

The Limitations Of Fun

Weaver’s Law: The quality of an entertainment is inversely proportional to the awareness of time engaged in it.
— Chris Weaver

As a general rule, we play games so that we can relax and have a good time, yet “fun” is actually a fairly narrow descriptor. It often makes one think of fun and excitement, whether it be the kind one experiences while riding a roller coaster, joking around with friends, or engaging in a game of cards or a board game.

The problem with entertainment as the primary goal is that games lose their emotional depth as a result. Fun encompasses emotions like suspense, excitement, exhilaration, surprise, and other forms of pleasure, but not feelings like sympathy, jealously, hatred, sorrow, remorse, outrage, or despair.

Video games, much like movies and books, elicit a wide variety of emotional and psychological responses from its audience. There is a wide variety of strategies to keep an audience entertained. Films with depressing conclusions aren’t fun in the traditional sense, but they can nevertheless be enjoyable to watch. The gaming medium has far more potential than the label “fun game” allows for in terms of exploring emotions and the human condition.

The impacts of the Covid global shutdowns have led to extensive research into the science of fun. In his research (“What Is The Underlying Psychology of Having Fun? Psychology Today), psychologist Travis Tae explains what makes life enjoyable:

My research on fun shows that although a myriad of activities — traveling to a new city, riding a roller coaster, meeting old friends, watching a movie, going to a concert, etc. — can be considered fun, the intensity of the fun experience rests on two psychological pillars of hedonic engagement and a sense of liberation. Having fun, in fact, is an experience of liberating engagement.

A state of hedonic engagement features an active involvement and immersion into an activity that is intended for pure enjoyment. For instance, a 39-year-old female respondent from California described her experience at an escape room as, “…wow it was so much fun! We had to work together to solve puzzles to get out of each room. Nothing was TOO hard, and the stories surrounding each piece were really engaging.” Similarly, many others expressed the essence of fun being how the activity itself is engaging in and of itself, rather than for an external goal (or an overemphasis on “winning”).

How many times have we told ourselves or our family and friends, after game night that “it’s not about winning but about having fun?” Indeed, my field interviews with a couple of seasoned blackjack dealers at a Vegas casino expressed that the players and dealers rarely have fun (and is even shunned upon) at a high-stakes table while there’s much more fun and joviality at a $5 table.

Another essential characteristic of fun is the sense of liberation — a temporary release from various internalized and externally imposed restrictions, such as work obligations, parenting, schoolwork, and to add to the list, mask wearing and social distancing. Throughout my research journey, the theme of “letting loose,” “being carefree,” and “getting away from it all,” was a recurring topic within really fun experiences. It became quickly evident that if you want to kill someone’s fun, you can do so by enforcing behavioral and psychological limitations, as the pandemic had done to our lives in the past year or so.

We can experience each of the two pillars — liberation and hedonic engagement — independently of one another. For example, we can feel a strong sense of liberation when paying off that student or personal loan but not necessarily experience fun, while drinking that glass of first-growth Bordeaux may be exhilaratingly enjoyable but not necessarily fun. It’s the combination of hedonic engagement and liberation (e.g., going on a summer vacation to Cancun with your friends or family, after a heavy-laden workload during spring) that makes experiences really fun.

Designer Marc LeBlanc (8kindsoffun.com) breaks down fun into eight categories: Sensation, Fellowship, Fantasy, Discovery, Narrative, Expression, Challenge, and Submission.

Sensation: Game as sense-pleasure

Fantasy: Game as make-believe

Narrative: Game as unfolding story

Challenge: Game as obstacle course

Fellowship: Game as social framework

Discovery: Game as uncharted territory

Expression: Game as soap box

Submission: Game as mindless pastime

You can also try the very practical approach of Scott Rogers’ conception of Un-Fun:

Start with a “fun” idea. As you develop the game, if you find something in the game that is not fun (or un-fun), remove it. After you have removed all the un-fun, all that should be left is the fun.

Koster’s Theory of Fun

Raph Koster’s book, “A Theory of Fun for Game Design,” is a classic. Koster does not shy away from the challenge of addressing what it takes to develop a game that players can’t put down. He also demonstrates the failure of games that are boring and boringly unfun.

The book’s central assumption is that video games are inherently risk-free educational aids, making them all a form of edutainment. In the same way that animals use play to learn social skills, hunting techniques, and other survival skills, so too do people use games as a kind of education. When people learn in a fun and engaging way, they feel good about it and it sticks with them longer. The endorphin high we get from playing a video game is what keeps us coming back for more. In most cases, we stop playing a game once we reach a point where there is nothing new to learn from it.

Koster expands his theory to cover the application of ideas like “chunking” to the process of game design. The term “chunking” refers to the method through which a complicated operation is broken down into simpler parts and eventually becomes automatic.

Koster then applies game theory to the fields of biology, psychology, anthropology, and other social sciences. Fun, in his view, is something that challenges and interests us in a variety of ways, with learning being the most important. He claims that the fun of gaming comes from the satisfaction of overcoming obstacles and succeeding at the game’s objectives.

Lazzaro’s Four Keys to Fun

The “Four Keys to Fun” of designer and professor Lazzaro can be used by both designers and researchers to provide fresh ideas for gameplay mechanisms. Player investment arises when their preferred activities have an effect on their feelings. Player engagement is driven by their feelings, which are evoked by the game’s mechanics. People play video games for four main reasons.

At first, they are intrigued, and then they are drawn deeper into the experience. This is what is called Easy Fun since it’s entertaining without the need for participants to score or maintain score.

Next, games provide a target with manageable subgoals. Hard Fun is the result of gamers having to use strategy and learn new abilities to overcome challenges. As long as the player is able to channel that anger into a focused effort, they’ll have a great time, and when they finally succeed, they’ll feel like they’ve accomplished something truly monumental.

The thrill of victory is amplified when shared with good company. To maximize participation, People Fun combines elements of communication, competitiveness, cooperation, and leadership. People Fun involves more feelings than any of the other three forms of entertainment put together.

Serious Fun is the last category, and it’s where gamers go to improve themselves and maybe even the whole planet. For them, gaming is more of a value-expressed activity than a time-waster because of the rhythm, routine and sense of completion they experience when playing.

These Four Keys to Fun center on the most common actions taken by players during their games. A minimum of three of the Four Keys are present in all top-selling video games. Although they each have preferences, gamers like all four of these features. During a single gaming session, they will generally switch between a few modes of play. Changing between play styles is enjoyable for players since it provides a new experience and a chance to feel something new.

Iteration

As methodical and sequential as what has been described may appear, there is actually quite a bit of going backwards; this is known as iteration in the design process. The design process is often imagined as a seamless, logical flow, as if it were always carried out by Spock-like people on uber-logical Vulcan. Look up “the design scribble” in Google Images to discover what design looks like in practice!

Because it’s possible to make changes to earlier ideas even late in the design process, and because just when you think you might have solved something, you find out it’s back to the drawing board for that idea, the Design Squiggle simply reflects the messy nature of reality and the way one moves forward and backwards on a design project in a more chaotic manner.

Creating a game (or any other kind of creative work) is typically an iterative process. In the early stages of development, a game may only include basic pieces, colors, shapes and letters for visuals and limited gameplay. The team adds new functionality to the system with each cycle. Gameplay features are expanded upon, existing game mechanisms are refined, and the visual and auditory presentation more accurately reflects the team’s intended vision. In order to achieve polish, remove bugs, and make the game feel finished, iteration is crucial to the design process.

To iterate is to repeat an action while improving upon its prior outcomes. That is, feeding the results of one repeat into the calculations for the next. The ideal way to approach this is to visualize cycles or drafts, where each step or iteration builds upon and improves upon the previous one, bringing the game through progressive phases of evolution from an initial skeleton (wireframes do actually look skeletal!) to a fully realized whole that’s recognizably as an experience

Prototyping, Playtesting, Iteration & Fun was originally published in Sound & Design on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.