Another excellent article I just want to quickly point out to you guys: It’s a short piece by the MTV Multiplayer blog about the design process behind the Shadow Complex world.
It basically boils down to the Chair Entertainment guys prototyping the entire game world on paper and playing through it. Accoding to the article this method helped identify and prevent at least a few issues that might otherwise have ended up in the final game. That just goes to show that there’s a lot of trouble you can avoid if you building a good prototype.
Lovely stuff – and great to see people showing practical results for paper prototyping. Too often people dismiss it as useless for anything other than turn based games, when it’s actually handy in a wider range of stuff!
(Also, loving the blog – level designer here, enjoying it.)
Hey Amanda, thanks for the positive feedback. Nice to hear that.
As for the paper prototype, I totally agree that prototyping on paper can be very useful. It’s also just so much faster to make changes. Granted it might not work equally well for all games but since Shadow Complex has a very formalized level structure – actually operating in a coarse tileset for example.