Are you a lone developer or part of a team? How might this affect your decision to prototype aspects of your project?

Question

What will be an ideal response?

Answer 1

Projects developed in a course focusing on prototyping may be structured in a variety of ways – involving solo work, teams of small groups, or an entire class game. When options are available, students should discuss how they would like to proceed in developing their original game concepts. This chapter discusses prototyping as a six-stage process involving data gathering, horizontal prototype, review, vertical prototype, review, and focus testing. Students should consider internal vs. external prototyping, forms of testing (alpha, beta, focus), game design documentation (GDD) development, and prototyping formats. The GDD in particular might be more elaborate when working within larger teams – with different team leads or sub-teams taking responsibility for distinct areas of the GDD. The use of lower fidelity prototypes might be initially more comfortable with a lone developer (depending on experience) – and vendors may be hired to create assets and some functionality when needed. However, Creator provides many prototyping advantages to the lone developer: eliminating the need for core-level prototyping (e.g., rendering engine), cross-platform delivery (HTML5, iOS, Android, Mac/Windows desktop), and Viewer (for iOS and Android).