Introduction

Greetings,

Welcome to my game prototyping blog.

I am Joeri van Ees, and I'm a student at the Utrecht School of the Arts in Hilversum, The Netherlands. I study Gamedesign and aspire to work as a gamedesigner at a company after I graduate. I have found that fast efficiënt analog and digitial prototyping skills are increasingly becoming a requirement for gamedesigners to prove their concept ideas these days. Since I lack experience with these means I decided my graduation project might be the best free time I get to get down and dirty with these methods and learn to overcome my biggest obstacle, actually building what I design. I am no programmer by trade though so there's a lot I need to learn and frankly code kinda scares me :(.

For my graduation project I will be researching and learning protoyping methods for games. I will be looking at tools like GameMaker, Unity3D and Paper Prototyping methodes. The goal is to become very proficient at protyping by the end of the project and know as much of the ins and outs as I can. This should help me when I have to test a game idea quickly for either a client or personal projects.

I will start off by looking for the most common returning elements in games (elements you need to build no matter what the game is). I will then attempt to design and build these elements in Unity 3D using Components, Classes and Editor scripts. I will be working in a Room with 6 other gamedesigners that are all doing projects that focus on gameplay. So I'll try to learn as much as I can from their methods of prototyping.

I'll try to share as much of my insighs as I can and I hope the information is usefull to outsiders.

If all goes well I will try make these elements a flexible as possible so you can quickly throw them together and test game ideas. Kinda the digital equivalent of a box of building blocks.

This blog is meant to track my progress, show my progress to outsiders and to stay on track and time. I will also use this to think of what to do next so be prepared for lot's of thoughts flying around in the posts to come.

First things first though and that's getting familiar with Unity3D again, planning  and ordering the tasks for the weeks to come and setting up my projects structure so I stay neatly organized.

I'm looking forward to this and I hope it will all work out in the end.

I have found some video tutorials by InsurgentX. They show you how to build a RPG environment. Since these environments make heavy use of classes they should be a good warmpup for my project. They seem to start off with the basics again though but it can never hurt to refresh those again.

http://forum.unity3d.com/threads/107593-InsurgentX-s-Unity-Advanced-Tutorials

Enjoy the blog!