One esoteric area of game design that I truly excel in is paper prototyping. I am the Queen of paper prototyping. It may be my extensive experience as a table-top gamer, or perhaps my deep love of arts and crafts, but I can prototype anything with just some blank paper, tape and a sharpie. Actually, maybe I’m the MacGyver of paper prototyping.
But if all our games turn out digital, why paper prototype at all? There are lots of good reasons for it:
- It’s cheap
- It’s fast
- It’s easy to iterate
- Anyone can do it (no programming required!)
- It can be a fun collaborative excercise
- It opens your creative synapses in a way that staring at a screen doesn’t
When I was at Telltale, I used paper prototyping for just about any “mini-game” type of puzzle I created. Originally, I actually prototyped most things in Photoshop with clever uses of layers. (I would turn them on and off to represent different states of the puzzle). But I found that paper prototyping had some huge advantages.