Prototyping

Earlier I wrote how I keep a list of my ideas. When I have enough ideas that fit my game I start to plan my next prototype of the game. I will select few ideas that I am going to include to my prototype. After the ideas are selected I start to design them into features. Once features are implemented and tested, I have a new prototype ready for game testing. In this phase I try to see how well the ideas actually fit into game. I seek for flaws and think how I can improve the game more, if some idea does not work, I will remove it from the game. Each prototype must bring new features to the game and they must be playable. By playable I mean that the prototype does not contain any unfinished features that may cause bugs.

After the prototype is tested and accepted, I start the whole process from the beginning and select group of new ideas. I repeat this process until I ran out of ideas or when I am happy with the game. Ok, so I know that in real world it’s not possible to repeat this process as many times as I would like. There will be a time limit when the game must be ready. There is also a thing called budget which limits the amount of money that can fed to the game. So I better start to scope my game to certain limits, otherwise I will end up writing about this same game next summer.

Luckily this game is quite simple so it should not be too difficult to scope it on feature wise. I would like to set a time limit as well, but since I am doing this on hobby wise, I have very limited amount of time that I can spent in a week for this project and that time is very random.