Category Archives: prototips

never reinvent the wheel

 

Well, I didn’t play any games last night, but I did finish the prototype for Canardo’s Dungeon. I had planned to just sketch out the board with Sharpies, but then I remembered seeing something that would fit the feel of the game nicely. What I needed was a numbered track that looked like rooms in a dungeon, and the level tracking board from Munchkin Pathfinder Deluxe would be perfect with a few minor graphical modifications.

I found a high resolution image of the board online, made a few alterations in Adobe Illustrator, printed it on label paper and stuck it on some card stock. It looks great and conveys the theme I’m going for pretty well. Much better than I could have done in the same amount of time with Sharpies. With a pawn and some coin tokens from my parts bins, I had an attractive finished prototype.

For early prototypes, use what’s on hand. Borrow art from the web, if you want art. Don’t spend a lot of time reinventing the wheel.

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A tweet from Nat Levan reminded me of a trick I picked up from working on prototypes at different computers.

Whenever I download a custom typeface for a prototype, I always put a copy of the font file in the game’s folder on my hard drive. Later, when I copy the folder to a thumb drive to work on a different computer, I’ll have that type available to install on whatever device I’m using.