Polish in Prototyping

Prototyping is an experimental process that creates a tangible experience to test a concept. In game development, prototypes can take a whole range of forms, from rough physical approximations to high fidelity render experiences. When building a gameplay prototype, developers need to work fast and focus on what is important for the experiment. As adding polish is time-consuming, it is often the first sacrifice made while prototyping.

However, a lack of the right polish can be detrimental to achieving the goal of the prototype. This session will talk about the importance of polish when prototyping and how to leverage it to get better results from your experiments.

The focus will be on in-engine prototyping to experiment with gameplay designs and technical features. Together we’ll dive into techniques for determining what is significant to the experiment, cost-effective ways to add polish to a prototype and concrete examples of success and failure when polishing features. The examples come from a wide range of gameplay and technical prototypes created in AAA environments down to independent game jams.

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About the Presenter

Luke is an expert engineer with a passion for networked gameplay and a background in robotics and computer vision. With almost 20 years of engineering experience across several disciplines, Luke’s game dev journey started over a decade ago by getting a foot in the door at Bungie where he built tools for the Halo and Destiny series.

Since returning to Australia, Luke joined Wargaming Sydney and has worked on a variety of technical projects, including the World of Tanks AR streaming experience. He currently leads a multidiscipline team building gameplay prototypes and features for Wargaming studios around the world.

Agenda
• 6:30pm – Introduction
• 6:35pm – Presentation begins
• 7:20pm – Question time
• 7:40pm – Stream ends & online networking begins (@Games With Wings Discord, link will be provided in chat)

This is a free event sponsored by Wargaming Sydney for the Game Dev Community.