Prototype on paper is fun!

I’ve learned today that prototype on paper is really fun!

While my son was sleeping, my wife and I took a prototype session with some drawings on paper:

While she was playing the smith, I had the game engine part in my hands. It was quite fun to see what she is doing and how I created new challenges on the fly.

What did I use for prototyping?

Nothing more than paper and a pen – so you could say it was a pen and paper experience. And it was fun!

The Blacksmith’s Shop

First I created a visual for the blacksmith’s shop. Obviously my painting skills are poor, it was still good enough to get my wife into it. My blacksmith’s shop had a blacksmith, his working area and a storage for coal and iron – my first two ingredients – keep it simple for prototyping!

If you take a closer look, there is iron and coal in small paper pieces at the storage in the bottom left corner.

The Recipes

Then I had ‘cards’ as recipes with name of item and its material costs and creation time.

The Market & Flying Vendor

We got a market as well, so that our blacksmith can buy ground materials like coal and iron for his work. Actually he can only buy at this market and there is a flying vendor that comes once a week into our village to buy item from our blacksmith. Everything is payed in good old blinky blinky gold coins!

Additional to the market there is a flying vendor that visits the village once a week to buy items from the blacksmith. This is in the beginning our main income because we are not that well known. So only people from our village or other people that pass our village might take a look into our blacksmiths shop. But since we have weekly costs (food, drink, fun) we need to get money and the flying vendor is a good solution.

Prototype Game Engine

And then there is the game engine – that takes care of time that passed by, player gold and items he or she crafted. Additional to this there are cards with NPCs, but while we played this prototype I just created new NPCs on the fly and played them without paper. That was almost Pen&Paper RPG at it’s best!

Every X in the time table is one day – it starts in the morning with a blank square. At 12am the square gets a slash and at evening it gets an X. That means it is evening and the blacksmith’s  working day is finished.

Conclusion

Prototype on paper is really simple and a quick approach to see if it is fun. You should avoid paying too much time for detail and keep mechanics and size of a prototype small.

Read how we played this prototype on paper and what new insights I got. (Coming soon in next post!)