It’s from a while that I believe that “prototyping” is an overrated design approach. I always believed that a game should be done exactly as it was imagined, as close as possible to the idea that sits in the mind of the designer. I believe in a strong “vision” and direction and I don’t accept that a “prototype” is going to tell me what works and what doesn’t. I think it’s just a way to get fooled.

In short I think that prototyping is a bad way to figure out whether an idea works or not, whether it’s fun or not. In fact I believe that the conclusions coming as a result of those tests will likely be misleading.

To explain myself better I could oppose to that approach its theoretical negation: take the worst concept and reiterate long enough, and I’m sure you can make something fun out of it.

That’s what I believe making games is like. You persist doing something that just doesn’t seem to work, trying instead to make it work as you imagined it. It’s a strife. A prototype will just tell you that the idea sucks. But persist long enough and I’m sure you’ll finally reach your goal, and suddendly everything will start to work exactly as you imagined. Making a great game that finally can be recognized by everyone else. “Recognizing” is the key because that’s the function of a prototype, and, still, it’s what that approach does worse.

I believe that “game design” is “working against the odds”. A designer is a fool that noone can understand what he is saying. Someone who speaks in a tongue you don’t understand. A stranger. But, one day, he arrives and shows what he meant for all that time. And a standing ovation explodes, like an epiphany.

Game design is an epiphany. It’s a concrete way to let people step in your head and finally understand and participate. It’s an happy end. A catharsis.

And you cannot “test” a catharsis. You cannot anticipate an epiphany. Those things only happen when there’s a strong will behind.

This is why I believe that game design should always start from a strong *necessity* and that should always follow a definite direction. It’s a volitional act. NOT experimentation. The experimentation is just for the scientist, for someone who cannot shape anything in his own mind. For a designer in search of ideas.

But the “true” designer isn’t in search of ideas. He has an overflow of ideas.

I believe that prototyping is necessary only in the measure it becomes an “enabler” for the reiteration: a prototype is often something self-contained, so offering the requirements for the reiteration to start and refine the model. It’s about execution, not about the concept. The concept is a “black box”. It should never be tested, never doubted. It’s… faith.

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All this after the announce of Valve’s Portal. It’s not really something that Valve built, but more something that Valve bought (the company website is currently down due to high bandwidth usage).

I tried the concept demo (mirror) but I wasn’t so impressed. It gave me a strong nausea right away (due to the inertia in the walking movement more than the portaling stuff, most likely) and I had to stop just past the third or fourth room (the one with the boulders). It’s a quite simple puzzle game, without some dynamism it’s just about discovering the right trick to move to the next room. Immersivity is next to none.

Then dress it up with a retro sci-fi/realistic mood, add a portal-shooting gun, add some more dynamics elements, picking things on the fly and a more realistic physics system and… wow! It’s simply awesome.

Great idea to time this on the release of Prey, like if they are mocking them by using the portal technology for something way more innovative.

It’s time to go develop a netcode for that. Multiplayer madness.