Prototyping
Every Saturday I publish a report reflecting on the previous week. These reflections exist to demonstrate my progress, share my experiences and help transfer what I learn to others.
The Past Week
It’s been a productive week, and my wake-up trick helped immensely. After building a playable prototype, I ran a playtesting session with a couple of friends.
It’s very early in development as you can see, but prototyping early and often has lots of benefits, and I’ve already noted a major one. So far I’ve only been toying with a few ideas for mechanics, but the playtest helped me see the game inside. Now I know what game to build, and unless unforeseen obstacles come in my way, I’ll be releasing the game by the end of the month enshalla. (it’s small)
The biggest problem I had this week was with the playtest scheduling. When I’ve built a core mechanic, I didn’t want to make any assumptions on what sort of game would be good with it, and instead waited to watch actual players toy around with the pure version. I ended up wasting an entire day waiting without further development until I met my friends, and instead written an article to minimize lost time.
Analyzing Problems
The reason why I ended up wasting development time, was because:
1. I didn’t schedule a playtest early enough
2. I greatly overestimated the time I’ll need to build the core mechanic
What’s Next
Next time I need player testing, I’ll make sure to book players early. It will also be very helpful to find alternatives to in-person testing when not possible.
I hope you benefit from this reflection. I know playtesting so early can be scary if you fear judgement, but its benefits can’t be stressed enough. Unless you’re prototyping some kind of a patent, you don’t need to worry about people “stealing your idea”, and the benefits, from saved time to saved costs, far outweigh such risks.
God Bless, and please comment below with any thoughts 🙂