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itsamoose

Game prototyping tools

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I'm interested if anyone has any suggestions for good game development prototyping tools.  I find myself often creating prototypes, but in the space of that end up doing a lot of basic systems work that ultimately isn't necessary for a proof of concept type design.  I'm ideally looking for something that would quickly allow for the creation of basic mechanics (graphics not necessary), or even something as simple as a a comic strip creator to setup some basic scenes.  I assume something along these lines would be of use to a lot of us, so I figured we could compile a list here.

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It really depends on my initial conception I have for the project since I have a lot of genre-specific engines available to me.

TyranoBuilder is an excellent program for prototyping or making visual-novels. It's very fast once you are familiar with it.

RPGmaker is great for prototyping narrative games that have top-down exploration as a main mechanic. One of the major benefits of RPGmaker is the spectrum of assets available by default. The included music and sound-effevts especially can help me write the story; I look through the sound-effects and find one that surprises me and it may influence how I see te story I'm working on.

Scratch is great if I want to come up with an idea for a arcade-like game. I've run into some really frustrating bugs in it though that seem to be engine problems, so I would only use it to prototype unrefined arcade mecahnics.

I'm trying to build a library of clearly marked, easy to understand, simple scripts in Unity for prototyping. This involves including lots of public variables. I have a hard time still with keeping the scripts basic and general enough for this to work properly, but now that I know prefabs can be moved between projects, I think I'll be doing prototypes in Unity a lot more.

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I've mostly used Unity and Phaser. I think sticking to one engine might be a good way to build up a toolset to make things faster.

 

A lot of devs I know have made themselves a Unity prototyping kit. With small scripts and visuals assets that are general use.

 

I've also heard that Robert Yang makes all of his games inside the same Unity project.

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Here's that Robert Yang post: http://www.blog.radiator.debacle.us/2013/04/the-joys-of-sub-projecting-in-unity.html

 

It's a clever solution, though like he says really not great for bigger projects. I've been thinking about this a lot recently in the wake of wiz jam '16, where I reused a bunch of UI components from other projects. I think my solution will probably be to figure out how git submodules work and set one up with my extensions and whatnot.

 

As far as a comic strip creator...idk, I hear that BigJKO fella is working on something like that. On a related note to that, Matt Derby (a designer at Harmonix) gave a GDC talk a couple years back about using comics as design documentation that was useful to me http://www.gdcvault.com/play/1020456/-Nuff-Said-Comics-as

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