The prototype-playtest cycle

Many people ask me “what’s your method to hack a game?”. I have no secret recipe to offer you. But I have a principle that I learned from making games over the years: you must test your plaything ASAP. The sooner you get other people to try it, the quicker you’ll evolve your idea into something playable and meaningful for other humans! That is the principle. 

In this lesson we will put that into practice. By following the PASAP principle, not only will you get to satisfying results quicker, you’ll also realise that a lot of what we call game design happens when you’re playtesting your ideas with other people. It’s social, and it can be a lot of fun! No squeezing your creative brains in solitude. 

Is there a catch? Yes, sort of. PASAP means deciding what the nub of your game is, putting together the quickest and ugliest playable version of that, called a PROTOTYPE, then getting people to play it. You may not feel comfortable sharing something that is not quite finished, something that has still lots of question marks hanging around. 

😰 What if people don’t understand how to play it, or simply don’t like it? I still feel quite nervous when I playtest game prototypes. But I learned it’s worth it, and I’m going to share some tricks to help you put that discomfort aside, and to help you involve other people in this fun process of growing your seed of an idea into a game.

Let’s prototype!

Let’s get all the ingredients!

Before we start hacking together your plaything, here is a list of (craft) materials for you to get. You don’t have to buy them. Instead, see what you can find around you: 

• PAPER You may want a few large sheets to draw your game board, and maybe paper in different colours too.
  If you don’t have blank paper, see if you can recycle some from old newspapers, magazines, or packaging.
  If you can get hold of some cardboard, that could be useful too, as it’s thicker than paper.
• COLOURS These could be coloured markers, pens, or anything that allows you to write and draw on paper. 
• LITTLE OBJECTS Also known as tokens. These could be beads, dried beans, pieces from other games, or even small bits of paper. 
• optional STICKY NOTES to jot down your ideas for the game rules
• optional SCISSORS to cut paper
• optional GLUE / TAPE to piece things together
• optional DICE to generate random numbers, which is quite common in board games. You can either borrow dice from other games, make your own dice using this printable template, or use digital dice.

Let’s prototype!

1. You can start by making the smallest hack to your game. See if that even requires you to redraw the board, or change any component of the original game. It may just be a case of tweaking one of those invisible blocks that is a rule.
2. As soon as you make a change, you need to test how it plays. You can quickly test your tweaks by playing your new version by yourself or with your co-designers. This is called SOLO-PLAYTESTING. At some point later you’ll test your game with people who’ve never played it before. But for now, you can do that on your own, or with the other people who are making the game with you. 
3. When you playtest, don’t be afraid to make changes on the fly. At this stage the game is evolving rapidly, and there’s nothing set in stone. It could be a bit of a whirlwind…
4. Jot down your notes, and start writing the game rules. You can use this rules worksheet to capture ideas on how to play your game. I like to write down rule ideas on post-its and stick them on the worksheet. As I test, I move post-its around, in and out of the rulesheet. This helps me (and other co-designers) keep track of what rules we’re actually playing by (it could otherwise get very confusing very quickly!)
5. Feel like you have something you could get other people to play?
   
   1. 😐 Probably not. Not yet… ok, go back to step 1 and repeat the prototype, solo-playtest and rule-writing steps with another hack. There is no golden rule on how long this should take, or how many repeats/rounds you should go through. As a reference, I would spend no more than one hour doing this. Don’t worry about making your prototype look beautiful, or complete. It may be a waste of time if you then decide to discard an idea and try out something else!
   2. 😁 YES, you feel ready to playtest with other people. Great, that’s the spirit! Move on.