Benefits of Prototyping without Assets

Objective: Grasp the importance of prototyping without assets and how it can expedite the prototyping phase.

Often, game developers will want their game to look like a game — and quickly! But sometimes getting hung up on wanting to get the polished-look as one of the first steps can launch a game developer in to development hell.

The key to learning and creating games in a timely fashion on tight deadlines is to really hone your rapid prototyping skills.

When you have a simple-looking prototype that just uses primitive objects, typically most people are able to focus on getting the functionality down and smoothing out any kinks in the code much more quickly.

There are art assets online or you can pull on a game artist or designer on your team…but ultimately you need a good foundation for a functional game first.

Art assets, while they can be beautiful, can be distracting and a game developer can start rushing the process or divert their attention to too many different systems they want to work on. Usually because they see how the game looks, they want it to function a certain way.

There’s no “right” way to make a game, but ordinarily, there’s an order to systems that need to be built and connect to each other. A game developer needs to be fully focused and on track with that order and what takes priority.

Polishing a game can take a large percentage of the development time, but is usually the second half of the development process. Validating the code-base is solid is first priority. Then inserting art assets and adding additional features later on tends to be best.