Postmortem on the Reverse Prototyping Workshop

Yesterday, on October 7th, we had a quick lecture on reverse prototyping. After that we got about two hours to analyse any digital game, take out the core mechanics from it, to make a paper prototype using those mechanics. We did this in order to learn how to create certain aesthetics of a game. This is my postmortem of our paper prototype game.

The Game We Chose

So we picked out The Walking Dead, the video game. It is a heavily story-based adventure game made by Telltale Games that released in April 2012. We had decided to pick an adventure-type game because we thought it’d work fine as a paper prototype, and we went with The Walking Dead since it’s one of the more successful games within the genre in modern time.

Our Idea

It was fairly obvious to us that the core mechanic of the game was to make important, plot changing decisions in a limited time span. We decided to structure our prototype in so called “rooms”, each of them containing some sort of event where a decision had to be made. Due to our limited amount of time having the prototype done, we limited ourselves to four “rooms” and two choices per room. Each decision had their own consequences later into the game, so the player had to try to predict how their choices would affect future events. In this case, we made the player a survivor who is protecting a young girl. He/she is given the choice to save an old man in the beginning of the game. They would have to shoot the attacking zombie, using the only bullet they have left in their gun, or walk away. If you save the man, he would show you to his secret storage room as thanks. But it would turn out that he was infected and later attack you and the child.

Problems During the Process

Our paper prototype got finished just in time, meaning we didn’t have time to test it at all. Luckily, our prototype didn’t exactly need the same kind of testing as a game of another genre. There was no combat system to balance or anything. But we didn’t even get to do a trial-run, which wasn’t good. It turned out that our game also was very quick to play through, approximately two minutes. We had needed more time, for sure. I think this happened because:

– It was strongly story-driven, and writing a narrative takes time. I was personally way too ambitious on the story for a paper prototype, and only finished writing the narration for the first room. One of my team mates was smart enough to just scramble together a set of notes with the choices and their consequences.

– We didn’t divide the work equally between all team members, putting the biggest workload on just a few members in the group. I think this also originated from us doing a linear, story-driven game. It was hard to figure out how to divide up the work, since the “rooms” had a very strong connection to each other. Though, I think everyone could have had work to do if only people took enough initiative or if we’d had a producer who planned and distributed things for people to do. If I were to redo this assignment, that would be the main thing I’d focus on. Then we would most likely have been able to do a longer paper prototype, with maybe six rooms instead of four.

Summary

All in all, we seemed to manage capturing the core mechanic of The Walking Dead ( hopefully not just because of the zombies). People also seemed to enjoy playing our game. The only bad critique we got was that it was too short. I’d say that our prototype was a success.