Game Engines
Digital game prototypes are typically created using tools that allow the game designers to provide a rough example of how the game will play and behave. The most common tool used in any kind of digital game development is a game engine.
A game engine, also known as a game framework, is a software development environment designed for people to build video games. Developers use game engines to construct games for consoles, mobile devices, and personal computers.
The core functionality typically provided by a game engine includes a rendering engine for 2D or 3D graphics, a physics engine or collision detection, sound, scripting, animation, artificial intelligence, networking, streaming, memory management, threading, localization support, scene graph, and may include video support for cinematics. Game engines allow game designers to reuse and adapt large portions of a game to produce different games or port to multiple platforms, within the same engine.
Needless to say chooing a game engine for the project is important. With so many options which game engine should you choose? The video below shares 5 of the top game engines.
It can be rather easy for the game production team to spend too much time creating a digital prototype that is more polished than it should be. To avoid this trap the game designers will often build their digital prototypes using simplified languages such as phyton, in lightweight game engines, or making use of preexisting game libraries within a game engine.
At the 2021 Computer Simulation and Gaming Conference (CSGC), Jonah Warren an Associate Professor of Game Design & Development at Quinnipiac University presented a talk on Small Game Engines as Prototyping Tools. In this talk, he features a variety of game engines that are excellent for creating quick digital prototypes such as Twine, Bitsy, Ren'Py, Choicescript, and Puzzlescript.
No matter which tool is used for digital prototyping, remember that the ultimate goal is not to create a completed game but to demonstrate the fundamental features of the game.