RYAN DOYLE
Designer and Lead Programmer on Something About Fish, an online multiplayer card game.
https://somethingaboutfish.com
GDEX 2026 Presentation: Paper Prototyping: Playtesting a game without spending any development time
How do you test if an idea is fun without going through all of the difficulty to program it first? One way is to turn it into a board game! Rather than spending two weeks implementing that crafting system or a couple months making a multiplayer game, board games allow you to experiment to find out what needs fixing beforehand. Even if it doesn't seem like your game would work this way, you can probably test a lot more than you think.
