Day 16: Why Prototypes are Important
Back when I started these medium articles, I mentioned that I have quite a few unfinished projects. A big reason for that is because I wasn’t properly prototyping my game ideas. Often I would get stuck trying to figure out how to add some awesome dragon to my game when it wasn’t even really a game yet.
Games are fun for many reasons, and while art is important, really it’s just polish. Amazing art won’t save a game that isn’t fun or engaging. Hardly anyone wants to play the exact same game with a different skin. However, an amazing, novel experience can be so engaging that it can make up for simple art.
As we’ve seen, we can go pretty far making a game in Unity with just basic 2D or even 3D shapes. It just makes sense to use these placeholders for the art, and work on the gameplay, controls, and major features of a game first. If the game isn’t fun to play without any art, it almost certainly still won’t be fun with art. That’s why we work on the gameplay first, do the best we can to make it fun, and then decide whether or not to invest more time and money into the project.
Once we’ve made sure it really is an idea worth pursuing, only then worry about adding in art assets as necessary. By prototyping first, we can also narrow down exactly what art assets are required to finish the game. Without that critical first step, we might end up buying or making assets that we wouldn’t even use in the end, which wastes time and/or money.
This is a lesson I’m going to take to heart in the future. One day I will return to making games on my own, and I will take these little cubes and spheres as far as I possibly can. I can even made a dragon out of these basic shapes!
