Traditional design tools never satisfied me when it comes to prototyping for games.
They look fine. You can interact with it, hand one to someone and they’ll nod and interact where you expected them to. But playing a game isn’t clicking where you expected. It’s pressure, intensity, the half-second where your thumb is already moving before your brain has caught up, and this instance is where you want to apply [^System 1 thinking]. No design tool I’ve used has been able to help me achieve that.
For eg, Take a passing mechanism in a football game. A Figma artifact can show you how the pass works, the arc, the receiver highlight, the button mapping. What it can’t show you is what happens when the user’s player is cornered tight against the touchline and they have a fraction of a second to pull that pass off. That second one is the whole thing. How the interaction feels when you are pressed. The first one is just a diagram of it.
I kept running into this throughout my career. Different games, different scenarios but the same obstacle. I went through Origami, Principle, ProtoPie, InVision, Sketch, Figma, and each time I came out the other side with the same conclusion: the only place this interaction lives is inside the codebase. Test it there or you’re not testing it.
Which would be fine, except testing inside the codebase meant pulling a frontend developer onto a prototype. And getting a resource allocated to prototype, test and iterate is hard. In production terms it’s a tough ask, you’re spending engineering time on something that might not ship, to answer a question that’s hard to articulate until you can feel it.
I did try to tackle the obstacle myself. Tried to learn Unity, got far enough to build and ship prefabs. But I could never figure out how to embed those prefabs into an active codebase and turn them into something I could actually prototype against. The prefab existed. The game existed. I couldn’t get them to talk to each other in a way that let me test the thing I cared about.
That’s where it sat. A problem I knew the shape of, a fix I could see, but wasn’t able to reach it on my own.
In the next part, something changed that, and it wasn’t a new design tool.