http://www.amazon.com/Game-Design-Workshop-Second-Playcentric/dp/0240809742/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1233184029&sr=8-1
It's a pretty good book; I'd definitely recommend it to anyone interested in the topic of Game Design, though perhaps not strongly. I am still only halfway through so my opinion could still change. In any case, I bring this up because it has really driven home to me that it's a good idea to do prototyping and user-testing as part of game development. And the earlier, the better.
Now, my first project with the SENG system and engine was "To The World Tree" (http://www.prankster.com/ttwt/), which was essentially a demo game. For TTWT, I did very little prototyping, and what I did might almost be more described as unit-testing. I didn't do any user-testing other than myself, except for getting comments and feedback after the game was done. Now, there are good reasons for what I did; I did TTWT as a game for the Independent Games Festival, using the deadline as a forcing function to myself to actually get something done, and thus there was not time to do a lot of extra testing or prototyping. And, in fact, TTWT is somewhere between a prototype and a demo; a lot of the development served as me figuring out what worked and didn't work, what was feasible, etc.
Nonetheless, going forward, I'd like to work more heavily on the prototyping and user-testing. Instead of trying to prototype a complete but small game, instead, prototype specific interesting scenarios. For instance, I've always thought that the SENG engine would do a good job of having a party fight a large number of (wimpy) opponents, like having a party of 4 player-characters battle 20 goblins at once. The engine has relatively small graphic and computation requirements on monsters, so this should be a pretty cool encounter for the game. But when I was developing TTWT, I didn't really have time to explore fully what kinds of scenarios would work well (and not).
So, my "Untitled SENG Project" agenda looks something like this:
- Finish the engine updates I've been working on (these are either things that I had wanted to do before, or that had come out of the TTWT project).
- Develop a number of quick, compelling prototypes to test out key scenarios of the SENG engine.
- Inflict these prototypes on anyone who I can get quick feedback from.
- Proceed with the game design based on what comes out of the prototyping.
I see the prototypes as being standalone applications, that get the player right into the targetted action of the prototype. So, in the party vs 20 goblins prototype, there might be a quick introductory screen explaining the basic controls, and then the player is right in the action with pre-generated characters.
I don't have a list of the prototypes yet, but I still have 2 months to go on my "real-world" contract, so there's still a bit of time before I can really dive in. Perhaps in future entries I'll do some brainstorming about the prototypes that I think are important.
