Get best of the week

3 free tools to make prototyping games even easier



Prototyping is one of the most exciting things about game development. A stage of free experimentation and testing of any, even the most daring or strange ideas. But spending valuable time checking each one is expensive and time consuming. Is there any way to facilitate this process?

Lead game designer at Ustwo Games, creators of Monument Valley and the recent Assemble with Care for Apple Arcade, talked about how the studio uses free tools for creative prototyping. Translation under the cut.

The most important thing about prototyping is to know what you're trying to prove. One tool will not allow you to create everything you need in storytelling, level design and logic. But launching small prototypes can be a great way to test big ideas for every element of the game. If you are delighted with the idea, then it is much easier to prove its coolness to the rest of the team right in action.

Free software like Fungus , ProBuilder and Twine is a great opportunity to apply this approach, we constantly use them. Even if the prototype is not completed, it will still give an idea of ​​something new in a future game.


Ustwo Games used Fungus in early prototyping Assemble With Care

Design with Fungus


At a basic level, Fungus is a tool for creating narrative elements within Unity. Like Scratch and other visual scripting systems, Fungus consists of blocks of code. They can be rearranged and ordered, which provides additional tools that can be connected directly to your game for prototyping.

We first started using Fungus in early prototyping of Assemble With Care, our latest release for Apple Arcade. Matt Newcomb, the project’s lead programmer, suggested using his dialogue formations - we already knew that they would be central to the game.

In Assemble With Care, you play as Mary. She is a mechanic who helps the townspeople fix things. When restoring items, you communicate with the client - by analogy with conversations in a hairdresser or taxi.

Conversations should be dynamic, and characters should respond to the player’s actions at the moment when, for example, he unscrews the back of the camera. Fungus makes it easy to do this: it “listens” to the gameplay, and then starts the sound and on-screen text when a certain action is completed.

We played a lot with this functionality in the early stages of Assemble With Care - sometimes even too much. We had one level concept where we had to fix the doll. The player picked up and interchanged various parts of the body (from the pirate head to the legs of the skeleton), and the child watching the process reacted to everything with enthusiasm or horror. The level was funny, but did not fit into the game, so they decided to remove it.


Fungus was used for logic at all levels. Assemble With Care

A less creepy idea was to fix the frame for the picture. In the process of repair, the glass fell out and broke into small fragments. In Fungus, it was as simple as turning off one object (whole glass) and turning on another (shards).

We could do it very quickly and rudely at Fungus, so we did not have to waste valuable programmer time. Despite the fact that the level did not get into the game, he still taught us how to surprise the player.

These two examples did not go further than the prototype, but Fungus did. As a result, we used this software for the logic of the levels of the whole game, building on it with our animation and code blocks. The tool is so amazing that we will use it for NPC dialogs in our upcoming projects.

However, I have one piece of advice on using Fungus during production. If you combine Fungus with your own code, it is very easy to confuse them - this can be a nightmare when it comes to debugging. I recommend a clear distinction between what you write in Fungus and what you write in C #. This will save you a headache.

Using ProBuilder


ProBuilder is a free Unity tool focused on 3D modeling and level design. With it, you can quickly create a level environment without having to run separate software like Maya or Blender. Unsurprisingly, ProBuilder is another extremely useful prototyping tool.

We used ProBuilder to prototype Assemble With Care, but some team members (including myself) were already familiar with the tool.

With it, you can quickly create both objects and the environment. Let's say we designed the level at which it was necessary to fix the lamp. In ProBuilder, we can quickly make a lamp that will not just be lifeless cubes - in fact, you can create color base shapes to make it easier to recognize. This means that each member of the team could visualize and understand where the object will go and how the final level will look.

But what works for some developers doesn't work for others. Our artists struggled with ProBuilder because the software is designed to be basic and easy to use. This is similar to how you are asked to work in Paint when you are used to Photoshop.


Almost all levels in Assemble with Care started at ProBuilder

To get around this, Max van der Merwe, our technical artist, created his own custom tool that will allow us to export from ProBuilder to Maya. When the levels went through the prototype stage, we exported existing forms directly to Maya. After that, our artists could work on specific details (for example, the outline of the lamp) before sending the finished object back to Unity. Everyone is happy.

In the end, almost all levels in Assemble with Care started at ProBuilder. Now the tool is very popular in the team, and we use it in projects that are not yet announced.

Twisting the story with Twine


Most likely, you heard about Twine - a free tool for developing narrative games through hypertext. Twine can be used to prototype long conversations, including branched narratives. In the vanilla version, you can add text design, 2D images, and other simple audio / visual elements. Finished projects can look like anything, falling between a beautiful digital poetry book and the Geocities website in 2000.

Twine is often considered a novice tool, but it can be extremely useful for creating "adult" prototypes. Since this is just text, you can imagine the game larger than it actually is - to say that there is a beautiful castle much faster and cheaper than drawing it. You can also associate Twine with Unity through Yarnspinner - but this is a topic for another article.

We used Twine a lot to create prototypes, especially for games with a long storyline. For example, a few years ago there was a pilot project that could be played for one or two weeks. The player answered the phone, talked to the characters, made some kind of decision, and then it was executed in real time. Twine is an easy way to visualize such a story and see how narrative solutions work in practice.


Twine is often seen as a tool for beginners, but it can be extremely useful for prototyping big games.

The simplicity of Twine can be deceiving. Remember the main rule of prototyping: know what you're trying to prove. Regardless of the skill, I do not recommend grabbing stars from heaven on the very first Twine project. Do not try to create something the length of a novel - do something for about 15 minutes. You will learn more about this tool by completing the project, and not just by diving into it with your magnum opus.

Instead of a total


There are some gorgeous games built entirely on Twine, but these tools alone will not give you everything you need. Many work well only in combination with your own code or with other paid tools. But still, when it comes to quickly testing ideas, they can save you.

These are just some of the ways that Twine, ProBuilder, and Fungus can be used to speed up prototyping. I am sure there are many others. Free tools have a huge advantage - tons of resources and guides. Choosing a free tool, you join the community of developers: from beginners to full-fledged experts. There is always someone who is doing something that you would never have thought of.

More articles:


All Articles