Game Development Reference
In-Depth Information
Paper prototyping is not trivial. Designing good board games is an art in itself, at
least as difficult as designing a good video game. It helps if you are familiar with a
wide variety of board games yourself. There are many more board game mechanics
than “role a die and move that many spaces.”
a Good paper prototypinG kit
corvus elrod, a professional game designer, recommends keeping the following items
together to use as a prototyping kit:
• Two near-identical decks of cards with different colored backs.
• A small notebook (not too big or it becomes distracting). Good pencils or pens, obviously.
• Tokens of some sort—poker chips, Go stones, or similar.
• Several dice; it doesn't really matter how many sides they have, and you don't need
a large number. if you design your mechanics using percentages, then two ten-sided
dice are useful for generating random numbers from 1 to 100 (elrod 2011).
To this we might also add the following:
• A pad of sticky notes
• A batch of blank cards, 3x5 or similar
We also recommend you add some card sleeves to your paper prototyping kit. card
sleeves are plastic sleeves that players sometimes use to protect cards for trading card
games such as
Magic: The Gathering
. They can be purchased from any specialist game
store. You can simply slide a marked piece of paper into the sleeve to create a playing
card that is easy to shuffle and handle. an additional benefit is that you can easily slide
in revisions on top of old cards. That way, the design history of your cards is preserved.
With these items, you have a way of generating random numbers, some tokens you can
use to represent the numbers (in a poker game, poker chips stand for money), some
blank materials for designating all sorts of things, possibly including a game board, and
a notebook to write down your ideas in. That's really all you need to get started.
Paper prototyping has two important advantages: It is fast, and a paper prototype
is inherently customizable. Paper prototypes are quick to make because they do
not need to be programmed. When creating a paper prototype, you should not
waste time on creating nice art for cards or boards; instead, you should spend your
time drafting rules and testing them. With some skill and experience, you can put
together a decent paper prototype for any game in a matter of hours. That leaves
you a lot of time to start playtesting and balancing the mechanics.
With a paper prototype, it is easy to change the rules. You can even do this on
the fly. If during play you notice something does not work as intended, change it
