Paper Advance Wars

For 3D level design, legos also work well. They can give a pretty rough estimate as far as what areas might be visible from a certain vantage point, and which areas might be good for cutscenes (if your game has them). For a reasonably large level though, you might need a lot of legos.

I think what it boils down to is that if you spend more than five minutes to look at the world of board games, PnP roleplaying games, and other non-computer games, you will discover an abundance of game concepts that have not been used by computer games.
It's a symptom of our modern approach to games that so little game concepts are being used.

Using paper prototypes, much like writing code in pseudo code, allows you to think outside the box, to take a different approach. It forces you to break out of your habits, to forget about the existing and overwhelming patterns.
A danger is to try and "translate" the computer experience to paper.

Someone mentioned "combo boxes were pieces of paper that could unfold"...
that's the sort of approach I believe should be avoided. Rather, try to use the medium and its own little quirks to do things differently.

Can you use what you do on paper and "translate" it to the computer?
I don't think that's the point. On the other hand, if you get a great idea on paper, imagine how much further you could push it with a computer...
(it's one of the sad things in cRPGs that with 30 years of evolution, all the computing world has managed to do is stick to Dungeon and Dragons :( Don't even get me started on that topic... :P )

Quote:

Original post by TheRealMAN11 There was an article on gamasutra about this a while back. Google reports the link as http://www.gamasutra.com/features/20050913/sigman_01.shtml.

Ooh that's a great article, thanks for the link!

The RPG I'm working on was played with pen and paper for years. If you knew all the algorithms you could simulate, say, FF6 with paper.

If you're working on such a game I would say it is a brilliant idea because:

a) It forces you to finish all the design aspects before you get into a bunch of programming

b) It allows you to test and balance the gameplay easily without having to program anything

I dont think you need to technically use "paper", just a simple system to let you test game basics. I'm play testing some concepts for my game using a game maker.

it must then mean that you're much better at using that game maker than at using paper.

For most people, paper is just a simple way of doing things. If you can think of simpler ways of doing them, then go for them. I'll just stick to paper and cardboard, if it'sd all the same to you...

Quote:

Original post by Fournicolas it must then mean that you're much better at using that game maker than at using paper. For most people, paper is just a simple way of doing things. If you can think of simpler ways of doing them, then go for them. I'll just stick to paper and cardboard, if it'sd all the same to you...

Real time concepts are kind of difficult to test on paper without so much increments that its more effective to use a simple piece of software.

IN fact, no. Real-time concepts are the most interesting things, design-wise, to transfer to paper, or table-top, those being considered together for the purpose. They only demand some adaptation of the rules FOR THE PAPER DESIGN, not for the overall design. In order to make things go smoothly, of course, you may want t-o use your computer to make all the calculation, and such, but most of it will rely on SOUND design.

Just make it sound...

Though an RTS could be effectively modeled using paper, I'm sure any tool a person can use efficiently to model their game is going to aid in testing the quality of its design. Isn't the point more about seeing how the numbers in the game end up affecting the whole experience? If so, I'm sure there's certain things a computer will be able to better than a paper model. Of course, if you can whip up a sample board and some paper game pieces in half an hour when it'd take a few days to write some code, then of course paper is the way to go. It's just a case of use the right tools for the right job. I can see how using a paper model wouldn't occure to a lot of people though.