Earlier last week I had said that I had reached a stage of the prototype that I was happy with and that the final game would probably look quite similar to what I had. I was wrong. I showed the prototype to a friend of mine who is good at providing feedback on these kinds of things. He suggested a few things to me about how to simplify the game, as he found the learning curve quite steep.

One of the things he asked me was: had I considered allowing the player only one move per turn instead of multiple moves per turn. I admitted that I had thought about it at one point but couldn’t figure out how to make it work in the game. After our conversation I kept coming back to that one question he asked me. Finally, on Friday, I decided to just implement it and see what happened (this is what makes prototyping so much fun).

Once I had made the change I suddenly realised that it drastically simplified how I was thinking about the game. However, it exposed a slew of problems with other gameplay systems. I started making notes about what needed to change and suddenly I had a list of about 5 major things I needed to overhaul to make this new system work. By the end of Friday I had a very different game. The core gameplay is still the same, but the game feels completely different to play.

I still need to implement about 2 more of the systems changes before I’ll consider this version of the prototype in a “complete” state, but I already like it better. My wife and I had a couple of friends in town over the weekend who don’t really play video games. I had them play the newest prototype and I was amazed at how much more quickly they were picking up the gameplay than people had, previously.

I think the lesson here is: sometimes you need some outside perspective in order to make changes for the better. I was already so used to playing the game, that I was unable to see some of the difficulties that new players were having with the game.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got a few more game systems to overhaul!

Owen

This entry was posted on Monday, September 15th, 2008 at 6:44 am and is filed under Design. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.