Photo (cropped) by Greg Dunlap, cc-by-2.0.
The Internet Arcade is a collection of 2,666 (at the time of this writing) coin-activated arcade games from the 1970s and 1980s. The games are playable in your browser thanks to a JavaScript-based emulator, brought to you by Jason Scott. [Read more…]
Paper prototypes are a great tool, but there are some video game mechanics that simply need to run on a computer in order to be tried out. Visual programming languages can be great for creating a quick digital prototype of a twitch mechanic (or whatever else doesn’t work well in paper).
Here are a few of the more popular visual languages for games (feel free to recommend others in the comments):
You can read about games and “flow” on Game Developer. Or you might want to check out Jenova Chen’s MFA thesis on the topic.
Below is a TED talk by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyik, who pioneered the concept of “Flow.