Phase 3

Iterative Implementation

Early prototypes are not pretty. They might be paper versions of a digital game, a single-player version of a networked experience, hand-scrawled board and pieces for a strategy wargame, or a butt-ugly interactive mock-up with placeholder artwork. Still, the prototype is more than an interactive slideshow—it is a genuinely playable game that begins to address game design challenges of the project as a whole.Katie Salen and Eric Zimmerman

You often hear artists and designers discuss the importance of "failure", the counter intuitive relationship to failure has almost become cliche, though often misunderstood. We're advised to "fail early and often", this of course doesn't mean we should try to fail, rather what creatives are referring to here is the early stages of an iterative design process. The time to polish and perfect comes at the end of multiple iterations of revisions, the start of a new project is when we should take risks and embrace experimentation, anticipating that we might "fail" and prepared to learn from it. The details of an iterative design process might look different whether we're making a game, a piece of software, an installation or a performance, but the core principles are the same.

Your idea will have lots of testable components, so be clear about what you need to learn and which components will give you the necessary answers. Prototyping isn’t about being precious. Make simple, scrappy prototypes to not only save time, but to focus on testing just the critical elements. You might be trying to learn something like, “How big should this be?” or “What should the uniforms of the social enterprise look like?” At this stage you should have a lot of questions about how your idea should work. This is a great way to begin answering them. IDEO
  1. Create a prototype: identify what you want to test and what you need to make in order to test it. IDEO's Field Guide has a worksheet on how you might determine what to prototype. Early prototypes can take a number of different forms depending on the type of project your working on, this might include sketches, scripts, UI/UX wireframes, storyboards and role playing.
  2. Test your prototype: invite members of your target audience to experience the prototype. Observe the experience, take notes and ask questions. In their notes on getting feedback, the authors of the IDEO Filed Guide remind us that "Capturing honest feedback is crucial. People may praise your prototype to be nice, so assure them that this is only a tool by which to learn and that you welcome honest, even negative feedback."
  3. Analyze the experience: we test prototypes with our target audience to identify what's working and what's not in a way that keeps our audience at the center of the process. Here too IDEO's Field Guide has some suggestions for how we might go about integrating our findings and feedback. But don't forget why you're creating this work in the first place. As you consider how best to integrate the feedback you've gotten from testing your prototype refer back to your creative brief as a rubric or set of guard rails to ensure you stay focused on your goals.
  4. Go back to step 1...

We want to start this process as soon as possible, in their book Rules of Play: Game Design Fundamentals Katie Salen and Eric Zimmerman have a "straightforward rule of thumb regarding prototyping and playtesting games":

a game prototype should be created and playtested, at the absolute latest, 20 percent of the way into a project schedule. If a game is a two-week student assignment, the students should be playing a version of the game two days after it is assigned. If it is a commercial computer game with a 15-month concept-to-gold schedule, a prototype should be up and running three months into development—at the absolute latest.Katie Salen and Eric Zimmerman