A game prototype is like when an artist sketches for fun. They are just exploring some aspect of the subject, or exploring a technique. They are often crap to the untrained eye, because the untrained eye doesn’t know what to look at. Over the years, people have come to respect quick artist sketches and they hang in museums.
We’re not there yet with games. I bring my prototypes to a prototype meet-up every few weeks. No one cares they look like crap, it’s not what we are looking at. We have great conversations about the issues each of us is exploring. You don’t get that by posting stuff to the internet.
It’s probably the same for rough cuts of films. You need to be able to look beyond all the crappiness, most people can’t. They get too caught up in the bad sound or lack of music, or temp music.
When I posted those screenshots of the little rpg I’m playing around with I got a bunch of people hyped over something they knew nothing about, mixed with people crapping on it for reasons where I go “ah, yeah, it’s a prototype.” People are too used to seeing finished game screens, or prototypes that have been so polished that they aren’t real and done just for marketing and PR reasons.
The bottom line is I’m not going to talk about what I’m working on. I might post a screenshot or two and carefully monitor the feedback. There might be one aspect of it I’m interested in, and I watch for that and ignore all the rest.
But holy crap… I spend 8-10 hours a day working on games.
Except if you are following the Evolutionary Prototyping method. Do you have any experiences with that development method in/for games?
btw: The “customers don’t know what a prototype is” thing is vaild for other software products too. For example if you start the development of an app with the GUI, you should never show this GUI to the customers. They think: “Oh, I can click on a button. The development of the app must be done already. That was quick.”
You are not alone! (Ok, Ok, with the exception that I don’t work on games )
I haven’ done it yet, but I plan too soon. It’s more work then I thought going back through all the invoices and adding up time and money. We didn’t really track people’s time, other then their invoices. Next project, I’m going to keep a running accounting of time spent for everyone.
Hello to all the forum members, I’m new here and this is my first post…after reading all the discussions and Ron’s replies in this thread I am a bit sad, like @megabrogames
In some way I started to imagine that with TWP the era of GREAT adventures could be back again and TWP could be the first of a series of new wonderful adventures, maybe with the same style. I played TWP with my children (4, 6 and 9 years old, of course they already played Monkey 1, Monkey 2 etc etc) and now they ask me almost every week if Ron Gilbert and his team will create another wonderful adventure. “Dad, is there any hope to see a new game? a new Ron’s Monkey 3, big, huge, difficult, with all the humour and puzzles that we love so much (well…no unbeeped for them eheh)?”
I see here that it will be very very hard to see another game like TWP: Ron GIlbert gave so much, did so much effort to create this game with so many difficulties that it’s hard to imagine he can do it again.
Anyway…Thank you @RonGilbert ! TWP has been the best game I played from the time of Monkey 2.
I loved the graphic, the interface, the dialogues, all!
Thank you @RonGilbert from my children, they talk about you like one of the family…and they will keep dreaming that now, after TWP, Monkey 3 is incoming…I cant tell them the truth, let them dreaming
well… you can always let your children play with monkey island 3, telling them it was made by Ron Gilbert’s friends.
I’m sure they will appreciate the game anyway!
I’m thinking our best bet for a new game is for Ron to pass the baton to some young whippersnapper programmer who hasn’t been beaten down by the games industry yet.
whippersnapper
programmer
not beaten by the games industry
young … ehrm … does it still count if I was grown up in the 80s? I mean, I feel young. Very young. Sometimes.
I don’t know if I count as young. I mean, when I showed you a pic of our Italian meeting you couldn’t decide which one was the youngest and I’m at least 8 years younger than both of the other two.
Maybe we could develop games for old people? As the amount of old people grows constantly this could be a huge success! So what about a hero with a rollator/wheeled walker who has to find a chrystal skul in the Andean and fight there against an old nazi in a wheelchair?
Do you have any experiences with that development method in/for games?
