Game prototyping tools

[Sarah Best]

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• Daniel Wu, a level 7 monster with 3 posts — 1 year, 4 months ago:

  Hi, I’m looking for tools to prototype my project which is web-based. I see that there’s a tutorial on Game Maker. I’ve also come across gamesalad.com and corona, which are app based. Does anyone have experience with all three to make a comparison? As a non-programmer, I’m looking for the game equivalent of the wireframe tool Balsalmiq.

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• Simon Dotschuweit, a level 2 monster with 7 posts — 1 year ago:

  I have exactly the same question, there are a lot of web site prototyping tools out there, but i haven’t found one specifically for games yet 

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• Tabby, a level 7 monster with 54 posts — 1 year ago:

  Fireworks is good for wireframing web-like interaction (it can make interactive PDFs which are great for clients) but alas, nothing specifically web-based.

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• Simon Dotschuweit, a level 2 monster with 7 posts — 1 year ago:

  good tip, gonna check it out, btw i’ve just discovered sketch flow, which beyond wire framing and screen flows allows to add behavior logic, dynamic states and simple animations, will let you know how that goes after I’ve had some time to play with it.

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• Dan Silvers, a level 7 monster with 31 posts — 11 months, 2 weeks ago:

  Look into Multimedia Fusion from Clickteam. It’s similar to Game Maker in that it’s 2D, but it’s much easier to use, is far less buggy, has a great community to support and assist in your development, and can even export to Flash. If you want to do heavier stuff it can even run Direct3D effects, allowing you to do some pretty cool stuff if you dig a little deeper.

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• Simon Dotschuweit, a level 2 monster with 7 posts — 11 months, 2 weeks ago:

  sounds awesome, will check it out or sure!

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• Theresa , a level 7 monster with 5 posts — 10 months, 2 weeks ago:

  Simon, have you been able to check out the various tools ? I am asking, because similar to you, i have been looking into GameMake and GameSalad. GameMaker has some great tutorials and I am finding GameSalad a little difficult to get started. Am wondering what success you had with either Sketch Flow or Multimedia Fusion ?

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• Simon Dotschuweit, a level 2 monster with 7 posts — 10 months, 1 week ago:

  I actually quite like ScetchFlow, have worked with it now for about 2 months and i like that i give you a seamless transitions from click screen prototypes, to introducing behavior and states (without coding) to actual coding if that should be needed. All the while you can upload prototypes to share them online, where testers can write comments, paint on the actual screens which is syndicated back into the designer software, pretty painless. However of course there is a downside as well, you need to buy MS Expression Blend 4 to get sketch flow, which probably isn’t that cheap from an indie perspective. We are in the biz spark program, so we get free M$ stuff, which made the decision easier for us, plus we do pretty all of our dev in .net, so that was an added bonus. Haven’t had time to try our Fusion yet, anyone else got XP with that one? Hope this helped a bit