Evolution of a prototype

05-11-2017


The first prototype for Heroes of Tenefyr was a bunch of hastily scribbled text on poorly cut out pieces of paper. All I made were some basic cards and a few enemies with loot attached; the bare minimum to have something playable. It seemed to play quite well, and solidified the idea as something worth expanding upon, so I did. More than 100 hand written little pieces of paper later, I had a fully functional prototype. It worked, it was quick, but it was also ugly and hard to read.

So I moved on to a second prototype version. I made a quick card layout with all the important elements present and typed out the text for all the cards, making some changes to the wording here and there and fixing things from the first prototype that didn't work. This prototype was much easier to read, which improved the ease of play a lot. Having a printed version also made it easier to make small changes, either by writing on it, or simply printing a new version. This prototype lasted for several months and was used extensively for playtesting. A lot of small changes were made to individual cards, but the prototype served it's purpose well.



The main thing that was lacking was artwork, and a nice design. I started working on an actual design for the layout, with different placement of the various elements to make room for artwork in the middle. Then I traced this design to make a low-ink easy to print version as the third prototype. This third prototype gives a better feeling of what the final version will be like and is great for testing readability and to see if the placement of all the elements of the cards feels intuitive.

I'm currently working on a fourth prototype with a semi-final card layout and placeholder artwork for all the cards, until the final artwork is done.



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