Quick and Dirty Prototyping: A Success Story

Abstract

Last November at the IGDA Leadership Forum, I gave a short talk on quick and dirty prototyping as a production method for small PC games. The topic was met with curiosity, as most producers were already comfortable with their existing waterfall or agile methodologies.While our studio, Boomzap Entertainment, is agile in the simplest definition of the word ("can move fast, is flexible"), we don't follow Scrum, XP, or any of the popular frameworks. Instead, we've tweaked a process that works best for our indie studio for the past five years -- a process I like to call "quick and dirty prototyping", though no one else at Boomzap refers to it as such.You can read a short summary of the presentation here. In this feature article, I'll expand on my original talk by discussing in depth how our studio does quick and dirty prototyping, the tools and tricks we use, and the benefits (and pitfalls) of using the method. I'll also be using examples from our latest game, Awakening: The Dreamless Castle, which was built through prototyping.