[BGDL Community Spotlight] The 3 Stages of Prototyping with Gino Brancazio

May 11, 2022·42 min·3 clips

Gino explains how a UX seminar taught him to avoid wasting time on beautiful but useless prototypes.

Prototyping sounds simple until the work starts costing real time and energy. Gabe sets up the conversation around three stages of bringing a prototype to life, then lets Gino Brancasio from Tinkerbot Games get into the messy part: when does a designer know a component deserves more polish? There is no tidy rule. Gino says the answer depends on the designer, the project, and where the game is in its process, which is honest and a little annoying in the way useful advice often is. Gabe keeps circling the middle ground between barely testing an idea and overbuilding something that may not survive. Gino gives that problem some weight. He talks about getting deeply attached to a component, realizing it did not belong in the current game, and needing time before he could let it go. It took 24 hours, then a couple of days of self-talk. After that, he put the piece aside with other components, not as trash, but as material for another game. That is the lesson Gabe pulls forward: sometimes the answer is not never. It is just not this game, not yet. The episode also gets into skill level and timing, because a strong idea can still be too big, too early, or pointed at the wrong design. The tone stays practical and kind. Playtesting keeps coming back as the thing that tells the truth.

As heard by us

A grounded look at prototyping as judgment, not just craft.

Gino Brancazio treats prototyping as a series of judgment calls about timing, fit, and when to stop refining a bad direction. The strongest part is the idea that prototype work is not one fixed ritual but a set of choices, which makes the guidance stay useful as a project moves…

Read the full review in PlayNext →

Why you'd press play

You want a clearer way to decide when a prototype deserves more investment.

Read the full recommendation in PlayNext →

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