Fast Prototyping

I was talking to my roommate today about an article I read about a group of graduate students researching game development, and he suggested that I share the article on my blog. Four members of the Experimental Gameplay Project over at Carnegie Mellon spent a semester developing over 50 flash games, while noting their successes and failures as they did so. Their article over at Gamasutra is a great look into the process of developing creativity on demand, and it has implications that go far beyond the casual gaming industry.

The project started in Spring 2005 with the goal of discovering and rapidly prototyping as many new forms of gameplay as possible. A team of four grad students, we locked ourselves in a room for a semester with three rules:

1. Each game must be made in less than seven days,
2. Each game must be made by exactly one person,
3. Each game must be based around a common theme i.e. "gravity", "vegetation", "swarms", etc.

As the project progressed, we were amazed and thrilled with the onslaught of web traffic, with the attention from gaming magazines, and with industry professionals and academics all asking the same questions, "How are you making these games so quickly?" and "How can we do it too?" We lay it all out here.

Through the following tips, tricks, and examples, we will discuss the methods that worked and those that didn't. We will show you how to slip into a rapid prototyping state of mind, how to set up an effective team, and where to start if you've thought about making something new, but weren't sure how.

We hope these well-tested guidelines come in useful for you and your next project, big or small!