ABSTRACT
Exploration in game design is about prototyping and figuring out what works and what doesn’t. This chapter presents 13 tools that can be used for this purpose, including ways to use role-playing to test your ideas, tips for making rapid analog prototypes, avoiding game exploration where you are mostly smashing things you like together, and more. The tools are focused on speed, validation processes, and tips and suggestions for how to prototype the ideas you came up with in ideation. The goal is that a game designer reading this and the previous chapter gets a good idea of the difference between having ideas and proving them. It also ties back into the different roles of a Level 1 and Level 2 game designer, as described in Chapter 1, by giving the reader an understanding of what kinds of validations a Level 2 designer will have to conclude to gain the required experience.
