In engineering school, I was introduced to the mantra of "Fail early and fail often - to succeed sooner." And I really understood what this meant working in the game industry, where the amount of ideas the team has for a project vastly outweighs the capacity to realize them.
One of my passions is rapid iteration through prototyping of any and all ideas that affect the player experience. In fact, I obtained a bit of a reputation at my studio for being exceptionally open to prototyping any idea, and doing so very quickly. Planning a design, understanding the problems and motivations of the design, then prototyping something interactive to try out is rewarding in its own right, but also helps the project discover worthwhile paths to explore that positively impact the player experience.
Because of their sensitive nature, I am unable to show or discuss in detail the player experience prototypes I was involved with, but the following are some general examples.
+ Feature Concept Prototyping
The Skylanders franchise is in its 6th iteration, and we need to continually innovate with each release. Several new game features are proposed, and those often require a large amount of work to fully realize. My work frequently involves stepping into these concepts, interviewing the people behind them, and creating their vision in an interactive mock-up. From minigames to UI concepts, to system ideas to metagame, the concepts were as diverse as one could imagine, as were the questions that rose from the prototypes. Is it accessible to kids? Is it easy to play? Do we find the core concept fun and engaging? It was far easier to determine the validity of the concept after the prototype.
+ Tool Prototyping
Because of the unusual diversity in my work tasks, I was uncharacteristically involved with issues that involved cross-departmental work. I was frequently approached by team members of all disciplines who had trouble with what they needed to do given the existing toolset. I worked on creating prototypes within our toolset that would accelerate their ability to do exactly what they wanted. Granted, I was not an expert in the toolset itself, and the tools I created were not always polished. However, these protoypes eventually evolved into actual programs they could use to solve their problems precisely. The tool prototyping became both a means to broadcast a workflow issue and a means to solve them.
+ Character Concept Prototyping
Designers (and non-designers) will often have ideas for a playable character or enemy. The idea may sound great on paper, but whether or not the idea is fun to use or intuitive to play is anyone's guess. My rapid prototyping of character concept ideas has enabled us to quickly demonstrate if an idea is feasible before pouring significant resources into its development. We can learn to pursue ideas that are intrinsically fun, or avoid ideas that are too heavy-handed.
+ Iteration Optimization
My work spanned several different departments, and I saw first-hand how different people put up with iterating and debugging in levels and environments that had so much overhead that even testing a simple change would take significant amount of time. I worked with countless individuals on a one-on-one basis to create custom, independent test levels and environments for their specific tasks or needs - ranging from level lighting, collectible props, enemy combat tests, UV material tests, audio test rooms, and even custom setups for demo reels. These optimizations significantly aided each person to more efficiently and more expediently iterate and solve bugs.