It looks nothing like the games they do for Adult Swim on Cartoon Network (Viva Caligula, Bible Fight, etc.), but here’s a great demo that NYC-based Pop & Co. produced for LEGO. I’m guessing it didn’t take half the effort of one of their full-fledged games, but stylistically, it’s a gem. Makes me nostalgic for mid-90s Nintendo.
On the Pop website, they offer a glimpse into their process:
“Whenever possible, we like to start every game design project with a non-digital … prototype that allows us to test basic gameplay before committing to pixels and code.”
That sounds quite a bit like the paper prototyping process we like to use on the UI side. Although with games, there’s a whole other dimension, which Bret Hummel of Ham in the Fridge demonstrated at the 2007 MiMA Summit: you’ve got to be able to adjust many subtle variables in a game to make sure it’s actually fun to play. He showed how his firm builds games in such a way that character properties, physics and game rules are turned into variables that can be adjusted simply by altering values in an external text file. That way, the game’s creative team can make adjustments ad infinitum (without going back into development!) until they are satisfied with the game play.
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