HTML5 Game Prototyping Course - Part 1

Welcome everyone! This is the first of many posts that will cover the topic of game prototyping and we will be putting game prototyping into practice by building some basic games in HTML5 using TypeScript.

What is game prototyping?

In game design, game prototyping is the process by which a game designer builds the simplest version of their game in order to test their idea and get feedback. A good prototype will convey the mechanics of the game the designer wants to build and it will allow others to test the gameplay.

The game prototype should be fast and cheap to build, and they should help you answer questions about your gameplay. The main thing to keep in mind is that when game prototyping, you are not creating a full fledged out game, you are just focused on creating the core mechanics, and later you can take what you learned/built in your prototype and turn it into a full game.

When building your prototype, there are two different kinds you can build: paper or code. In paper prototyping, these prototypes are built with physical items and these prototypes can help you understand how to make your game feel more authentic.

In code prototyping, these prototypes are built digitally, and they allow you to test different behaviors and quickly tweak variables to get different outcomes. The downside of code prototyping is that it can take more time and effort than paper prototyping, so it is important that you can create the simplest prototype.

In this course, we will be focusing on code prototyping.

Why game prototyping?

The main reason I decided to focus on game prototyping for this course is that prototyping is a skill, and like any skill it takes time to develop and improve. Game prototyping is an important part of the game design process, and it is a great tool to have in your tool belt when starting a new game, or even when you are participating in a game jam.

In this course, we will focus on building prototypes of some of the most well known games and we will focus on a variety of game types, that way it will allow us to practice prototyping a variety of mechanics.

Summary

In this post, we focused on:

• what is game prototyping
• what makes a good prototype
• gave a brief overview of the two types of prototyping

In the next post, we will focus on setting up the project.

I hope you found this article helpful. Please feel free to post any questions or comments below.