Intelligent Design

During GDC I took Marc LeBlanc‘s (and company) Game Design Workshop. One of the activities we underwent was building a paper prototype for a video game we all were familiar with. My group had very different tastes in videogames and so one of the only common interests we found was Pac-Man. We needed to act fast, and so went with it.

Paper prototyping, you say?

Paper prototyping is usually one of the first steps in the design chain, so this sort of reverse-engineering approach was certainly unconventional. Paper prototypes are commonly used to test core mechanics at a very basic level, to see if they are fun, appealing or at all interesting. With that in mind, what we had to do was identify the core mechanics in Pac-Man and try to translate them to paper. (more…)