It’s particularly tough (and slightly deceptive) when you’re trying to isolate an aspect of a larger design and test it in that isolation.

That said, newbies totally should paper prototype, because board and card game design is an excellent place to start in game design. It gets you to hard design problems straight away, instead of requiring either a team or technical skills developed over years.

My counter argument is that any newcomer to game design should definitely be using paper prototyping and game design documents when the start out. At some point hopefully the developer ‘levels up’and can move their art to the point where they are not as limited by the constraints which come from using a paper prototype as a foundation.

Newbies should be prepared to use a Game Design Document and or a Paper Prototype in the beginning… But know that after a while (perhaps years) they need to step away from the training wheels.

But maybe that’s just my opinion as a newbie.

Oddly enough this is really topical. I just saw an early budget proposal for Lantana Games first title Children of Liberty. This is great information for anyone playing around in the indie space and learning how to ask for money from initial investors. It gives context and framework to the dollar amounts. I’m going to send it over to him right away.

Thank you!

As a game creator, I’m at a very early stage. I want to learn more about making ‘coin op amuse’. After I’ve achieved that, I can use it for more artistic purposes later. I learned a lot about fun from The Void, because any other developer would have ripped it apart to make it more fun, and the lesson would be gone before we could ever see it.

I never said that they should correct it. Like you said, the art is the most important thing in an Ice Pick game, even if it makes it less fun. I’m glad they exist.

It’s true that is a very tight game, arranged in set of turns where you decisions could make you fall in this set of turns or perhaps in the next one, rarely you could get throught

Design, action game play, glyph interaction, sparks, tits, all is there just to distract you and amuse you, the game itself is a raw psychological experience with the only purpose of get through this as you always balance between a very polarized behavior of the characters.

I think the game offer a huge amount of mind and psy challange rather than coin up amuse.

By the way the game manages to lead us to write a few words here and there, something should be there to make that investment.