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Prototyping 50 Games in One Semester
StarEmperor writes "Gamasutra has a good feature about four grad students who created 50 games in one semester. The article presents their insights about game design, evaluating gameplay, and generally what makes for a fun game."
For FSM's sake! 2.5 years old.
*sigh*
Seriously, guys. The article is from October 2005, you know, when the rest of the internet read it.
Music speeds up when you yawn, but does not change pitch.
The prototyping method from the article has been around for a while at CMU, since about 1998 in a class called "Building Virtual Worlds". The whole theory is to get people to think creatively by giving them a central idea, a bunch of constraints, and an even bigger set of tools to play with.
The process is actually intended to NOT be perfect. The idea is for people to quickly design an idea, then sketch out the idea in code using prototype tools, then test it out in front of an audience, all in a week. The interesting part is when people start building on ideas from projects that are showcased. The good ideas are repeated and built on, and others are archived.
Think about this though...given a few simple constraints, you can do ANYTHING you want. It basically becomes a weekly cycle of playing, where on review the interesting parts are noted and you move on to the next play session.
I agree, some ideas take years of creating and planning, building. But, this process is never clean. The very best ideas are usually grown through quick iterations and experimentation, which Randy Pausch's process forces pretty well.
You can ask anyone who's taken "Building Virtual Worlds" or been in the ET program at CMU. They'll bitch about the crazy stunts they had to pull to get something working (imagine collision detection suddenly going kaput an hour before show-and-tell time) but there was no doubt that it was non-stop creativity.