TABLE OF CONTENTS Now that you know how to prototype, playtest, and revise your prototype, it s time to take a look at some of the underlying issues that you ll face when building out your design for a digital platform. If you ve begun with a physical prototype, you ll need to translate that core gameplay to a digital format. The main tasks in doing that are envisioning your gameplay using the input and output devices of your digital platform. This means designing for control systems like keyboards, mice, proprietary controllers, etc. It also means visualizing your gameplay in the form of a digital interface.
This doesn t mean starting from scratch your physical prototype helped you to formalize and test the essence of your game, the essence of what you will be visualizing. The understanding of your game gained from this experience will breathe life into the designs for your controls and interface. It will inform the decisions you make and give you ideas you would otherwise have never thought of.
What are controls? And as a game designer, how do they impact your job? By controls, we mean whatever input hardware allows the user to affect the game. When videogames were first invented, they were limited in terms of controls. Steve Russell and several other students at MIT programmed Spacewar in 1962, often credited as the first digital game, [1] and in doing so, they found the toggle switches built into the front of their DEC PDP-1 to be too cumbersome, so they...
