Another post anticipating the upcoming game creation challenge: Prototyping resources. First I'll be looking at the overall process of designing, prototyping and testing your games. Then I'll provide some practical ideas for prototyping.

Why and What

First, why and how do prototyping when designing a game. In short, you can only see how good your current state of the game design is by playing it. To play it, you need a prototype. A more fancy way of saying this is that game design is a second-order design problem; you are designing a the mechanics of a system but aiming for some specific results (a particular kind of emergence) when the system is in action -- players are playing (with) it.

Eric Zimmerman has written a fantastic article about this process titled 'Play as Research: The Iterative Design Process'. Go and read it!

How? Practical Tips on Prototyping

Practical tips fall into two categories of prototypes -- for physical games (such as board and card games) and digital games.

Physical Games

You don't need to have high production values on your board and card game prototypes but some basic functional needs must be met. If you have a card game you probably need to be able to shuffle the cards and their backsides should probably not identify the cards. Other tokens should be easy to handle, too.

For card games, I'd suggest buying colored sleeves from your local hobby store. There are also those with color only on one side -- you can just print (or write) to normal paper, cut the cards and place them into the sleeves.The resulting deck should be both shufflable (?) and the sleeves hide the contents of the cards to other players.

For tokens I like to use cheap poker chips available from any book store or even those dime stores selling crap. Get many colors to be able to prototype many kinds of games.

Other than that cardboard, magic markers, scissors and glue should pretty much do the job. Bluetack can come in handy when you need to change your "configuration" on the fly. 

Digital Games

First tip is to build a physical prototype of your digital game if you can. You'll get a concrete example of your idea and probably come across some things you need to clarify to make your design complete.

Other than that, I'd recommend you to use Game Maker, especially if are making a single-player game or a 2D game. For testing the user interface and basic mechanics Game Maker is also golden. You don't need to program vey much; all the basic events and actions can be specified by selecting correct icons on the interface.

So, those were my tips. Ian Schreiber has his own on the 4th lesson of Game Design Concepts course . You are more than welcome to share your tips in the comments.

image: rudy and ayok by alimander , creative commons licensed, non-commercial, share alike, attribution

Pervasive games aren't new, in fact they are the oldest form of games (I'm paraphrasing Pekko Koskinen from our role playing game theory study group last night).

This, coupled with very interesting view-points on political / educational / world-changing games (by Maija, Vili and other members of our study group) have inspired me to (kind of) continue working on my L'il Game Chef game To Elysion. And by continuing to work on I of course mean throwing it all to the rubbish bin and starting all over again.

Main themes for a new pervasive game to affect the world in not so subtle ways:

1. Encourage Real Action (Don't show, don't tell, don't encourage to solve problems in fiction level)
2. Anchor the Game on Everyday Life
3. The Boundary-Drawing is Built in the Player (don't sweat that, every people in society is programmed to do it)
4. Provide incentives and stimuli to return to the game action (Bascially same as #2, but cannot be emphasized enough)
5. Do not burden the Player with too much cognitive workload (fiction, rules systems, complex interfaces)

The rest, I think, is just basic level game design 101. Just like the social games we're seeing today.

I'm at the moment focusing on defining the theme of the game. There are a couple of bold ideas that I have, but it is probably too early to discuss them here. More to come later and I think I really need to talk about this with a few people.

This article is in Finnish. English translation is in the works. The article is about the continuation of my Little Game Chef gam, To Elysion.

Elysioniin on yritys yhdistää arkisiin julkisiin tiloihin suunnitellut interaktiiviset taideteokset yhteisölliseen nettipeliin. Taideteokset kehottavat kokijansa tarkkailemaan elämää ja kanssaihmisiä toisesta näkökulmasta; yhteisöllisen nettipelin päämäärä on tämän kokemuksen nostaminen yhteisön ja jaetun fiktion tasolle. Elysioniin on vakavaa leikilisyyttä ja esteettistä kahdentumista; kulkua vakavan ja leikin sekä fiktion sisäisen ja fiktion ulkopuolisen näkökulman rajalla.

Elysioniin sai alkunsa Graham Walmsleyn organisoimasta Little Game Chef -roolipelisuunnittelukilpailusta. Kirjoitin ensimmäisen version Elysioniin -eplistä kilpailupelinä. Kilpailun teemana oli immersio. Lisäksi kilpailussa oli ylimääräinen haastekategoria, jossa lisärajoituksena oli mahduttaa peli yhdelle A4-arkille. Rajanvedot muokkasivat peliä huomattavasti. Pelin kilpailuversio on saatavissa pdf-muodossa.

Tarkoituksenani on kehittää peliä eteenpäin kilpailun rajat unohtaen. Omaksi päämäräkseni olen valinnut ylläolevan kahteen osaan jakautuneen rakenteen. Sain kilpailun tuomaristolta ja kanssakilpailijoilta paljon hyödyllistä palautetta, joka osaltaan vaikutti päämäärän kiinnittämiseen. Suuri osa kommentoijista oli sitä mieltä, että Elysioniin ei ollut lainkaan peli. En väitä vastaan, mutta olen hyvin kiinnostunut siitä missä kulkee pelimäisyyden raja; onko pelin perusluonteessa konflikti ja viihde vai riittävätkö määrääviksi tekijöiksi interaktion määrämuotoisuus ja jonkinlainen toivottu lopputilanne.

Haluni tehdä pelin toisesta osasta julkisessa tilassa toimivaa taidetta lähtee halustani antaa ihmisille mahdollisuus käyttää julkisi tiloja ei-kaupallisiin tarkoituksiin ja omalta osaltani vallata niitä takaisin kaupallisilta vaikuttajilta. Yhteisölinen nettipeli tarjoaa onnistuessaan näille tarjouksille katetta kokemuksen syventämisen ja yhteisöllisen toiminnan mahdollisuuksien muodossa.

Ylläoleva sisältää paljon korulauseita. Selittäisin selkeämmin ja paremmilla sanoilla, jos osaisin. Suuri osa tämän idean kehittelyä lienee juuri tuota käännöstyötä.

I have reserved this little corner of Alt+Games to my own little experiments. These won't show in the main blog's front page, but you are welcome to check them out in their own section.

The purpose of Art+Games is to make art in the form of indie games and game modifications.

This is not meant as a comment to the on-going debate of whether or not games are art. Nor it is an attack to games that already exist: I consider many of them as art. Few, however, have undertaken the task of artistic game development; that is, the development of games with purely artistic motivation.