Step by step plan for prototyping

General
1

Hey everyone,

As I mentioned in another post I’m planning my first game with a friend and after finishing up our game design document with most of the decisions about the game, it’s time to make a prototype.

I already followed a couple of tutorials, so I’m not starting from scratch, and I have a fair amout of programming knowledge (backend dev), but what I’m really missing is an overview of all the steps I need to go through. In other words: what are the things that need doing?

I can imagine that it goes something like this:

  • Character movement and collision
  • Environment (tile map)
  • Animations
  • UI
  • …

…except better, with more detail. Due to my experience with programming, I know by now how to look up information when I don’t know how to make something, but before that, you have to know what it is that you need to make. Small example: if you don’t know how a game is made, you probably don’t know off the top of your head that collisions need to be programmed, or that a character needs to be instantiated, etc.

I hope this is clear enough; I basically want to know how the whole process looks so that I can go on and make the individual parts.

Thank you!
PS we can skip music and narrative for now

2

Depends heavily on the actual game. Since you have the design document, implement features you have there, one by one.

1 Like
3

And do a prototype build first. You should not be concerned at this stage about level loading and pausing and saving and artwork etc. First you want to make sure your game works and the mechanics are fun. Then you can pretty it up a bit and let someone play it. See if they think it is fun too. Clever animations and a pretty UI do not make a boring game fun. It is not one thing at a time, it is all of them all at once. They all feed into each other. So you start with boxes and circles.

1 Like
4

like others said implement features one by one, and it’ll be good
it’s like technology pretty much, you’ll learn new things when you’ll need them

1 Like
5

Hello, here is a method I use often : you can write down a feature list and spend some time putting it in the right order, based on what feature needs what other feature

I like to write them as if they were stories (like in a SCRUM project)

Example

1 A player moves the character

2 A player makes the character jump

3 A player attacks another character

3.1 there is another character

3.2 characters have health points

…

Visualising all the features will help you determine the right order and separate them in smaller features

1 Like
6

You start with a “minimum viable product”

distill the game down to its most fundamental game play mechanics and use simple art like squares and circles to test it

Personally I also like to load a bunch of sprites into a scene/ tile set and make a visual prototype just to see how it feels

3 Likes