Level 5.2: Prototyping in Paper

Prototyping in Paper

You can call it “paper” or “cardboard” or “non-digital” or “analog” or any number of things, but the idea is to have a physical, tabletop game that is playable without computers (or at least, without requiring programming code). Programming is wonderful and powerful but it is also slow and expensive in comparison to paper prototypes. Here are some advantages of paper prototyping:

It is cheap. Most systems can be prototyped with little more than a pencil and some paper, although I will give suggestions for other components for those of you that have some money to spend.
It’s fast. You don’t have to mess around with programming, or layouts, or artwork. Just write a few words on a scrap of paper.
It’s easy to change. Don’t like one of your numbers? Erase it and write in a new one.
There is no guilt about throwing it away. You came up with an idea that didn’t work? Oh well, you lost a whole half hour. Big deal. It’s like making stick-figure drawings: if your first attempt at drawing a stick figure doesn’t work, it only took you a few seconds, so just cross it out and try again.
Paper can be used to model most gameplay systems. Yes, even most of the ones we normally associate with being specific to video games.
By making something playable, you are forced to actually design the systems. No more handwaving of “this game will have 50 undefined cards”. You have to actually do your job as the game designer, and design the game!

Limitations of Paper

Paper prototypes do have some limitations that you should be aware of:

They cannot always handle “twitch” (dexterity or timing based) mechanics… although be aware that there are many dexterity-based non-digital games. Consider the similarities and differences between the Street Fighter series of video games, and James Ernest’s real-time card battle game Brawl. Some things carry over well… others, not so much.
Information that is hidden to both players but that still requires bookkeeping, such as the “Fog of War” mechanics prevalent in Real-Time Strategy video games. Again, note that this can sometimes be worked around — the classic children’s game Battleship has “fog-of-war-like” mechanics, and the board game Clue has information hidden from all players.
Extremely complex calculations are tedious on paper, and the systems that use them may be better suited to “prototyping” in a spreadsheet program like Excel. However, if the complex systems are a necessary and core part of the game, it may be a sign that “the computer is having more fun than the player” (to quote Sid Meier), and that perhaps some simplification would make the game more accessible.
“Eye candy” such as high-quality art and animation is obviously not prototyped easily with stick-figure drawings and handwritten cards. Then again, these are not part of the game mechanics. If your game relies on visuals rather than systems, that is a sign that you are not doing a strong enough job as the systems designer.
Paper prototypes are not very well suited for testing the user interface (UI) of a video game. Computer UIs are dynamic, but paper is static. You can get an idea of the visual layout with some paper sketches, but to know how it will actually be used on a computer, you’d need a digital prototype.

As you can see, the advantages of paper prototyping are very general and the limitations are specific, so the ability to prototype in paper is an important skill for any game designer to develop, whether they work in video games or board games or anything in between.