Feature: 'The Paper Chase: Saving Money via Paper Prototyping'

In one of today's main features, Giles Schildt, recently departed as director of game development at Austin-based Steve Jackson Games, publisher of games and rulesets such as GURPS and Munchkin, took the podium at Austin Community College to explain why video game prototyping is important, and how it can be done using basic, low-tech, old-school methods. Here, he explains one of the benefits of paper prototyping: "Paper prototypes also help expose the eventual game's core mechanics in a way that everyone can understand, including testers, who can be easily left in the dark about how the “real” game is supposed to work. Testing, Schildt said, is a lot like playing a “black box” game, where the outcome is obvious, but what's inside the “box” is not. “Most testers, when they look at a beta, they're really good at finding code bugs, because the code bugs will jump out at them and that's what they're trained to find.” Design is often buried under graphics and other abstractions that obscure the intended design. Instead of playing hundreds of times to learn game mechanics by brute force, having the analog prototype would open the box for testers who often can't be bothered to read design documents, he said." You can now read the full Gamasutra feature on the subject, including useful lists on what pitfalls to avoid when moving from digital to analog prototyping (no registration required, please feel free to link to this feature from external websites).