Here’s a great site for customizing graph paper that you can download and print out.
Speaking of graph paper, you might want to check out Conway’s Game of Life.
Comparable Basis
Learning Video Game Design on the Tabletop uses Kingdom Rush to illustrate how one might go about creating a “comparable basis.” Establishing a comparable basis is a useful technique for determining an initial design for a game’s various numerical data (such as what each type of tower costs in Kingdom Rush).
Here is a “tower pricing” spreadsheet that I created to work through the comparable basis I present in the book. It should be noted, that the spreadsheet is my own creation and not necessarily how Kingdom Rush‘s designers went about pricing the game’s towers. Even so, it is a useful example of an important designing technique.
See also: “Monster Hunter.”
Monster Hunter
Learning Video Game Design on the Tab
letop includes an outstanding essay by game designer Stone Librande, the lead designer at Riot Games (and previously a designer at Electronic Arts/Maxis and Blizzard).
In his essay, Stone talk about using spreadsheets to create a homemade tabletop game, and how those spreadsheets led to him breaking into the video game industry and getting hired by Blizzard.
For your own spreadsheeting pleasure, you can download and play with the Excel spreadsheets that Stone describes in his essay:
See also: “The World’s Most Boring Excel Spreadsheet” and “Comparable Basis“
Dice simulator
cropped from a photo by Patty Loof, (CC BY-SA 2.0)
A good and varied set of dice is an invaluable tool for prototyping tabletop and video games. A Pound-o-Dice is a very worthwhile investment, but in a pinch you might want to use this dice simulator.
The World’s Most Boring Excel Spreadsheet
macro language can be used in digital prototyping. By way of example, here’s an Excel file that recreates the action of The World’s Most Boring Tower Defense Game. This means it can be played as a turn-based strategy game (i.e., the player manually advances the turns by pressing a button) or as a real time strategy game (i.e., the turns advance automatically).
The World’s Most Boring Tower Defense Game is a web-based “game” that I use to demonstrate to my students how a video game’s “real time” action actually takes place over a series of discrete turns (what programmers call “ticks”). The game is also a useful example of what a digital prototype might entail.
You will need to enable macros in order to play the game (this mean it is unplayable in the Excel 2008 for Macs—that version of Excel does not allow Macros). If you run into trouble getting it to work, let me know—the code is a bit of a hack and I wouldn’t be surprised if it runs into problems in various versions of Excel.
In particular, the timer events that drive the sprite animation required jumping through some coding hoops. I wanted to use Excel’s VBA macro language’s “OnTime” event to cause the game sprite (the animated character) to move multiple times a second. Unfortunately, OnTime cannot respond faster than once per second in the Mac version of Excel. I got around this by using the Timer function, which returns the number of seconds since midnight. I use this to have the animation occur within a while-loop that pauses a specified number of milliseconds (more-or-less) as measured using Timer during each loop. Oddly, Microsoft’s documentation for Timer states that it will not return fractions of second on a Mac. But on my Mac it does, so I was able to get the animation to work. I’m not sure if the undocumented ability is due to a change in the Mac OS or in Excel itself, but it does work (at least, it does for me).
All that is to say, this Excel spreadsheet is a bit fragile and may not work for you. Caveat emptor!
Play The World’s Most Boring Tower Defense Game online
Download the Excel version of Boring TD
The World’s Most Boring Tower Defense Game
Play The World’s Most Boring Tower Defense Game
For many years I struggled to teach my students how to make the leap from designing tabletop games to designing video games. In particular, students without a programming background would consistently have problems defining a video game design as a series of concrete steps that do not leave gaping holes in the game algorithms.
Then one semester I taught my students flowcharting and had them create a flowchart that could play a simple game theory style game that I had designed. As if by magic, these students had no problem creating video game designs. Ever since that semester, I have always introduced students to video game design by starting with flowcharting. It has become my magical “turn you into a game designer” wand.
All this is covered in detail in Learning Video Game Design on the Tabletop , but I wanted to share The World’s Most Boring Tower Defense Game, which is one of the tools I use to demonstrate how a video game’s “real time” action actually takes place over a series of discrete turns (what programmers call “ticks”). The game is also a useful example of what a digital prototype might entail (see The World Most Boring Excel Spreadsheet for a version of the game that runs inside of Excel).
The World’s Most Boring Tower Defense Game can be played as a turn-based strategy game (i.e., the player manually advances the turns by pressing a button) or as a real time strategy game (i.e., the turns advance automatically).
Conway’s Game of Life provides another example of how “real time” is in actuality very a series of very rapidly occurring turns. As with The World’s Most Boring Tower Defense Game, Conway’s Game of Life can have its “generations” (aka turns) advance either manually or automatically (using the “step” and “run” buttons, respectively).
Visual Programming
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):
- Blueprints (Unreal)
- Construct 2
- GameSalad
- Scratch
- Stencyl