Instant prototypes

As an “idea guy” I know how flimsy ideas can be. You try to model the idea in your mind, but ideas have a lot of gaps your brain glosses over. A real experience always turns up problems and opportunities. So I ended up making two prototypes yesterday.

First prototype. What if a farming sim had a level editor so you could make a model of your home and other locations to use it as a task manager? That full idea would require a lot of programming and building of assets, but at a basic level I can make something that models the data. So now I have a simple application that defines locations, places objects in those locations, and associates tasks with the locations or objects. Just like with a game I can see upcoming tasks, what’s due, and overdue. And the question now is just, does this have any kind of beneficial effect, or does it become another task to maintain?

Second prototype. I refreshed an old idea, a sokoban-style puzzle game built entirely from words. Lowercase words can slide, while uppercase words cannot. Some words combine to form new words. Other words can spell out phrases. This was a slightly more difficult prototype to make because it included the spec for the level data, the level editor, and a game engine that can let me play the levels. Here the prototype has one purpose, to help me make game levels and test them to see if the game rules make for interesting levels.

This is potentially my most dangerous prototype. I can see myself playing with this for weeks making new puzzles as I try to sort out what makes a good puzzle in this game.