
How to Prototype a Game in Under 7 Days (by the World of Goo people) - pchristensen
http://www.gamasutra.com/features/20051026/gabler_pfv.htm
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jim-greer
This is a great article. Of all the smart people I've worked with, Kyle Gabler
is probably the only one I would call a genius. The fact that he can also
articulate the way he works is a nice benefit for the rest of us.

Little known fact: Kongregate and 2D Boy both operated out of Kyle's apartment
for our first year. We all left EA at the same time and were going to have a
game studio together but then I had the idea for Kongregate and tried to get
Ron and Kyle to do that with me. They stuck to their guns, with great results.

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mthg
Hey there, were you a coworker of Kyle's at EA? A fellow game graphics
programmer from Rockstar Games here.

I remember Kyle mostly from his days as a comic artist at my alma mater, Univ.
of Virginia. I was a comic artist and editor several years after Kyle
graduated but I still remember his work from my freshman year. It was a comic
called Drool and was a very morbid comic but hilarious if you're into that
kind of thing. It was much better than most of what comes out of xkcd and
other fluffy nerd comics. I believe it was canned after Kyle ran a Jesus joke
that rubbed some people wrong. The artwork in World of Goo comes directly from
his old work.

I would point you to a URL of his stuff if it weren't for the fact that our
school newspaper's website hasn't been fully functional since my roommate who
maintained it graduated :(

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rjett
Here's a decent article on Gabler from back in the day:
<http://www.virginia.edu/insideuva/2003/11/gabler_kyle.html> although it
doesn't display any of his work. My roommate was managing editor last year for
the CD and he likes to brag about the new site they have, but apparently it's
not working at the moment.

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sgibat
drool and other work of his:
<http://kylegabler.com/oldsite/contents/art/index.html>

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illume
Related to this is <http://www.ludumdare.com> \-- a game design orientated
competition that has been running since 2002.

You get 48 hours to make a game from scratch (art, code, everything) to a
theme voted on weeks before, and chosen 0 minutes before the competition
starts. These are the same elements which the Experimental Gameplay project
copied.

There you can see a journal from all the entrants, as well as source code --
so you can learn how the better game makers approach it.

Many game developers use it as a chance to prototype games, and get immediate
feedback as you develop. Also to help you refine your skills to allow you to
make games more rapidly.

It's a real buzz to enter the competition, as there's often 100 or so people
working on their games at the same time.

Since it's from scratch, you are forced to finish things up, rather than
working on engines(for you web dev people engines are the frameworks of game
development).

If you're into making games I _highly_ recommend you join in on one of these
competitions :)

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matthew-wegner
Kyle Gabler and Kyle Gray are awesome. Of interest to HC, Gabler went the
indie route, while Gray stayed inside EA but maneuvered politically to control
his own indie-sized team. I help organize the Independent Games Summit every
year at the Game Developer's Conference; last year we had them do a "A Tale of
Two Kyles" talk. The conference wasn't recording video, sadly, but there are
some writeups available. One is here:
[http://www.gamedev.net/columns/events/gdc2008/article.asp?id...](http://www.gamedev.net/columns/events/gdc2008/article.asp?id=1126)

2D Boy is speaking at this year's IGS with a numbers-focused talk, sharing the
success of World of Goo from a business standpoint.

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jderick
Are there any tips on the technical side of prototyping a game in 7 days? I'm
guessing most of these games are done in Flash, is there anything more to it
than that?

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icefox
Actually I want to say they were all windows apps, but I could be wrong.
Prototyping anything doesn't mean using the new whiz bang language, it means
using whatever you know. html+javascript, flash, sed _, java, lisp, C++, it
doesn't matter. It is about finding out if the idea works or not.

_ For a fun side story I wrote the original search engine for toybin.org in
sed :)

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elai
The 'make the toy' first is probably the most powerful tip.

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euccastro
If you like this stuff check this out:

<http://chrishecker.com/Advanced_Prototyping>

Edit: OK, this time I succumbed to karma whoring and posted it as a news item;
make any comments in that page:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=409861>

