Bringing Your Game to Life: How to make a Board Game prototype

hi I'm Adam Porter and this is my board gaming vlog and this is the second video in two days yesterday's video was about copyrights and protecting your board game idea and it was inspired by a viewers question fan Rick and fan Rick asked another question which was about prototyping so how do you prototype a board game what constitutes a prototype was expected I don't there's any right answer to any of those questions but I have been making prototypes for the last eight years or so in various different forms have tried lots of things out so I just thought I'd show some examples of the sort of things that I've done over the years okay so this is a extremely early prototype so a prototype that I might have knocked together it probably took me an hour or so to knock this together one afternoon and you can see it's handwritten I haven't even waited for the ink to dry before I shuffled I haven't stayed within the lines but I've basically produced a working prototype I've done a few solo tests with this before taking along to my group and the great thing about this it's it's on blank cards these are really good and you can buy them by thousands quite cheaply and they're so disposable you know this game didn't work I wasn't happy with it so I put it back on the shelf never touched it again and I don't feel that I lost anything and that's the important thing about making a prototype is that you make it disposable certainly for the bulk of your play testing so that you can keep changing things you can write on components you can tear them up and it's not going to cause you a huge amount of grief some designers will go as far as showing a prototype like this to a publisher I know a designer who doesn't really do much more than this before they actually get those things in front of publishers and some publishers don't mind that I think the important thing is that the game is playable you know you're writing that you must be able to read it sometimes people will come to the play test group and they'll bring along pen and paper prototype which is absolutely fine but the writing is so bad that nobody can read it which means that the whole play test is is is people just asking what does that say what does that say and that's no fun you know your prototype even him in its most basic form does have to actually be functional so that's a extremely early prototype once I'm happy with something like that then I to repurpose these sort of chocolate boxes and things for putting prototypes in and when they actually give something to a publisher I'd stick a label over something like this so so you know a simple little label like this stuck on to something makes it into a prototype that I can give to a to our publisher so in this chocolate box I have a prop this is probably a play test - or play test three for me so now I've actually just made the cards a little bit prettier and you know nothing too fancy in there and and I've put these these are just paper within a card sleeve so they're not very thick you know that's just paper and then I can pile on more paper as I change things let's go back there's a there's another version of the prototype so so as I change things I can put extra layers of paper on there and it makes it a little bit thicker a little bit more like a card but the great thing about this is if you have multiple decks in your game then you can have different colored backs on the cards without having to go to the extent of actually printing card backs which is a bit of a pain to do so there we go that's another relatively early prototype that never got as far as being shown to a publisher but just sits on my shelf maybe to return to one day I don't know in terms of a prototype that I actually did show a publisher and and got published this is the prototype for pick Coco my trick-taking game about peacocks and so I made these little card holders here and I actually had the cards professionally printed for this one and that's not really something that I do very often these days if at all because it's very very expensive but for this one I made nice quality cards and I had to hand make these card holders out of cardboard and I bought the little plastic bit at the base there from a board game extras website you can tend to find things like that on Google quite easily and they're very cheap components and so I made this sort of holder like this that could easily be broken down and put into a small box now you'll see these are just cardboard they're rough around the edges there's nothing very fancy about it you can see the sellotape on there you know this is this is not high quality stuff this is an amateur craft project because I know that the publisher is going to take all of this stuff totally rework it rework all the artwork make everything out of the cut out of the sort of components and materials that they want to the standard that they want and there's no point in wasting a lot of money and time on it this is an early prototype of quaza l-- one of my games which has just recently come out this one has dice in it and what i do for dice is i buy these blank dice from a website will just type in blank dice and you get that they're just playing on every side and then i print off on sticker sheets and i cut out these little stickers and stick them on by hand i use these these sort of dice all the time use a little plastic ties have loads of them in all different colors and they're really good I like those inexpensive components and they make quite a nice prototype this one you can see I didn't worry about printing cards professionally these are just on thick paper they're not even really on card but obviously in the final product these will be well they work hard you know components and so nothing super fancy but some nice graphic design and stuff on there this is the sort of packaging that I I would probably use to give some into a publisher just a simple repurposed box little sticker on it to explain what the game is again nothing very fancy in there okay so that's another example of a prototype that I've shown to publishers and this one has slightly different packaging so this one I put in this was the first site for doodle rush so I put this in a pencil case and this one has laminated boards okay so so you can see here the light catching it because this board is is laminated on one side but it's matte on the back there quite like doing that the way that I do that is I use a four sticker sheet so one sheet per one label per sheet I'll print onto that then I'll laminate it and then when you peel the back off the show you end up with one laminated side and one sticky side that you can stick onto this hard board and I use mount board that you'd buy from a craft shop you know usually for mounting a painting or or a photo or something like that but I use that because it's a really nice thick cardboard similar thickness to the sort of components that you might get in a board game and the great thing about having a laminated board like that is of course you can then write on it with dry white markers which and rub it off clean it off afterwards so so that's when I would tend to do a laminated board and then this one I've made relatively recently so let's have a look at this I don't know if this games going anywhere but I would certainly show something like in this sort of forum to a publisher and you know I it's it's a bit rough and ready but it's perfectly functional this is just cut out with thick mount board which I got from a craft shop and held together with glue and sellotape and printed with sticker sheets to create these sort of pyramids so that's the sort of standard of prototype that I would currently show to a publisher so this prototype but again repurposed box and from something I found at work you know which wasn't being used so this has a nice old magnate finish this is a really good box I really like these and this one is full of pieces it's got some of those dice with stickers on them it's absolutely loaded with different tokens I might have to cut back on the tokens before I start pursuing this one with any publishers but there's loads of them all stuck on to that mount board again and then here's an example here's a bunch of different decks of cards and they've got different colored backs because I've used different sleeves for them so this is a tabletop simulator version of my prototypes that I've just shown you and you can see I can sort zoom in and out I can pick up components and move them around I can rotate them ship them around like this position them I can pick up cards and or a whole deck of cards in that instance I can turn it over and show you here you know I can drop it on there on there on the board I can do all sorts of things on this and play an entire game virtually through the internet which I've never been particularly inspired to do until this Cove in nineteen lockdown and so I spent quite a few hours putting this together on tabletop simulator just so I can continue to play test the game albeit doing it remotely which has never appealed to me before this is the second game that I've played test on tabletop simulator although it's the first one I've put together myself the other one was done by a code designer and it's a clunky system it's difficult to kind of shift stuff around and remember all the different controls and everything like that and you know it's not as smooth as playing the game in the traditional sort of way but it is another way of producing a prototype of at very little cost and actually it gives access to play testers all over the world of course and rather than just relying on your friends actually turning up to play it with you in your in your local pub as I normally would do so yes so you can even do you know rolling dice and whatever you know all the things that you could do in a in a normal sort of normal game you can do in tabletop simulator and with regards to artwork and you should really be looking for creative commons artwork clipart off the internet as much as possible there's a lot of art out there that's free for you to use without a license there's a Creative Commons license on it if you goo if you google that Creative Commons then you should be able to find that stuff the long and short of it is really this artwork is purely there as placeholder often it just lasts for a single play test sometimes for you know a couple of play tests and then it's completely changed I redeem and reach ange artwork numerous times throughout the evolution of the game so alright so I wouldn't go out and and Commission somebody to make art for me because then I'm attached to that and it's very hard for me to change the prototype even at the point where I've shown it to publishers they might say to me okay I want you to go away rework it redeem it and so I don't really want to have purchased art before I show it to the publisher because I might have to rework it even then and once the publishers seen it then the artwork that you've put on there shows them the sort of mood of the game you know it gives them a feel for what the game should look like you know these these feathers I never intended the game to to look like this I just wanted them to get the idea that what we were going for was a slightly whimsical sort of peacock theme with these feathers and and it just sort of lays it out and shows them what what you're aiming for then the publisher can go away and Commission the artists that they want make it look the way that they want and even re theme and do all those sort of things I hope you found the video useful and enjoyable if you did please watch some of my other videos on my channel Adams board game Wales or visit me on Twitter at board game Wales or on BoardGameGeek I'm Adam 78 thank you very much for watching all the best

Channel: Adam in Wales

Views: 18,490

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Id: KlxEF1zXbK0

Length: 12min 6sec (726 seconds)

Published: Wed Apr 22 2020