Overview

Prototyping lies at the heart of good game design. The word prototyping means to create a working version of the formal system that, while playable, includes only a rough approximation of the artwork, sound, and features. Think of it as a crude model whose purpose is to allow you to wrap your brain around the game mechanics and see how they function.

To many first-time designers, making prototypes seems cumbersome, but if you invest the time, you ll discover that it teaches you about the essence of game design and that there is nothing more valuable for getting a game to work. You don t get bogged down with production-related issues or distracted by the window dressing. All you have are the fundamental mechanics to keep you engaged, and if these mechanics can sustain the interest of playtesters, then you know that you re onto something.

The main advantage of prototyping is that it forces you to define game mechanics in their purest form. If you look at most great games, the core gameplay is not complex. Studies show that human beings can, on average, track and manipulate seven concepts simultaneously. This was first established in 1956 by psychologist George Miller in his classic paper entitled The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two: Some Limits on Our Capacity for Processing Information. ^[1] In it, Miller showed 7 2 as the number of distinct items that humans can hold in short term memory. This strongly influenced the design of the U.S.