Hi everyone! This is Luna, Creative Director of Altitude. It’s been a while since we’ve posted on our blog; it’s time to update you on what Altitude’s been up to this year.

Casual Connect Asia

Gabby (CEO), Jay (game designer), and I went to Singapore last May for Casual Connect Asia. It’s one of our favorite game conferences; everyone knows each other, the content is good, and the networking is helpful to everyone (from indies to publishers). We had a booth this year, where we showed some of our games in development and got feedback from players. (We have lots to tell you about our upcoming games — stay tuned here for future posts!)

I also gave a talk on prototyping – specifically, how we prototype at Altitude, when it’s worked for us, and when it’s failed. Save for some technical difficulties (with my presentation slides not working), the talk went well, and has sparked some interesting conversations with other companies post-conference. You can watch the full talk below or you can download the slides.

All the GIFs

The video and slides don’t show the animated GIFs moving, so here are a few that help illustrate our prototyping process. Below is a sample of a full game flow done in Balsamiq, our favorite wireframing tool. You can get a game flow prototyped in minutes, then export as an interactive PDF for everyone to play

Here’s the first-ever prototype of Run Run Super V, where our coder quickly simulated a side-scrolling runner with temp assets:

Lastly, here’s an example of standalone prototyping, where we used cubes to simulate 3vs3 RPG combat. The initiative bars here worked well, but when we placed them in-game with all the other elements, they got lost in the fray and we decided to remove them:

Gamesauce

With the video above comes a lengthy interview by Gamesauce, where I talk about my journey in game design, what daily life is like at Altitude, and what we look for in a game designer. It’s a good read, especially if you want to know more about what game design is really like. The articles have photos of our upcoming games as well.

Check out the full article for more information.

Thank you very much to both Casual Connect and Gamesauce for having us! How do you prototype in your own studio? Drop me a line at [email protected] and let’s talk!