Category: Prototyping

The following essay was originally published in Tracy Fullerton’s Game Design Workshop (2008). I had given talks in the past on prototyping, but this was the first essay I wrote on the topic, and I think it holds up. If you’re interested in the Advanced Prototyping talk Chris Hecker and I gave at GDC’06, check out the old site, and scroll down a bit.

My hard drive was full of failures. Twelve years after learning to program, I looked back on all my software: none of it was finished, and what was, wasn’t ambitious enough. The projects that started out ambitiously always seemed to fall back to earth, like failed rockets lacking the power to propel their own weight into orbit. Sure, there were interesting ideas in there, lots of wacky toys, and I had even attempted a few large projects, but none of them ever came together like the cool games and software I had always admired.

Sure, I had become a pretty good programmer, and learned to make cool stuff, but clearly none of it would ever amount to anything. I just didn’t have what it took.

I went to graduate school at Georgia Tech, and read some Chris Crawford. I learned that he had the same problem. But he didn’t think of it as failure. For him, this was an organic part of the development process. The failures filling his hard drive were actually “prototypes” that helped him decide which ideas were worth pursuing. For each good idea, there were a large number of stupid ones that didn’t work out. Failing, for this successful designer, was a way to find the good ideas. The revelation hit me like a ton of bricks. Maybe I had a chance after all.

Continue reading “Catastrophic Prototyping and Other Stories”