Paper Prototyping Fateweaver
From game design classes to paper prototyping our new game. We’re moving fast over here.
Paper prototyping is the idea of making a physical version of your game so that you can play it as quickly as possible. This doesn’t mean making nice art assets or finding the perfect meeple. It’s very much the idea of a minimal viable product that gets you playing faster.
This doesn’t work for all video games of course. There isn’t much benefit for trying to paper prototype a platformer or a huge open world game. Unless you can boil down a part of those games into a form that can be simplified enough to play by hand.
By having quick access to a playable version of your game idea you can start testing out your design. Do the rules make sense? Is it too easy? Can a player complete the game? Does it need more cards or less cards? If you can paper prototype it, you can test it, toss it, iterate on it, in less time than it would take to program your original idea. It’s this time save that makes paper prototyping so useful. Instead of spending a month developing a minimal digital version you can have something going in an hour. You can even have other people playing it before even opening a game engine. As a young studio with minimal runway, this felt like the obvious path forward for our new game.
So we cut some sheets of papers into smaller rectangles, created a few cards, and started playing.