It Finally Clicked- Why prototyping is important

This post is included for posterity. It was originally posted in my now-defunct Discord server.

I'm finally trying to go about things sensibly and not expect so much from myself that I drain all fun from everything I do. Been prototyping a game concept I have in Unreal Engine. Made some good progress learning from existing C++ classes from the demo content yesterday and managed to get the camera to behave how I wanted.

The concept was to be running away from the dawn (microplanets). A perma-death survival game, of sorts. The sun, and the hubbub that is brought with it, is scary. The character prefers (can only live in) the serene solitude of night. Perhaps the goal could be to have some "near misses" that help character to come to eventually terms with daylight. How arty and original.

My idea turned out to be **** on a fundamental level really. Locking the camera to one direction gave nothing for the mouse to do apart from click. The game loop itself was basically an autoscroller, which, unless carried by music like a rhythm game, no one likes.

The significance of these few hours tinkering was that for the first time I was adopting the approach of the games I enjoyed playing. Prototyping. Prioritizing gameplay over a creative concept. Programming is hard but programming a simplified version is much more feasible. I actually used to be against prototyping, trying to do everything in a single pass instead of iteration. I used to think it was wasted effort.

Completely unsustainable. It turns out everything is much harder to translate into final code and art than I liked to believe. Working with boxes and debug text is way better in every way. I have pre-existing problems with motivation- let's not waste time on a concept I was creatively invested in but grow to hate because I didn't test to see if it would work in practice.

Next time, I am going to explore some variants of my original concept, and if I cannot find a way to make it work I'll come up with another scrappy concept.