Being a guy with a background in business as an entrepreneur, I’ve written my share of documents and plans. Now that I’m game development, I’ve noticed a lot of similarities between business plans and game design documents. Not only are the documents aiming to do similar things ie. plan things , having to write either one is always a bit of a pain. I’ve been recently challenged to do 10 game prototypes this month which also requires 10 GDDs to made. Somehow that reminded me of having to write a bunch of business plans back in the day and using Alexander Osterwalder’s Business Model Canvas as a bit of a shorter one page alternative for quick analysis of business models as well as Ash Maury’s Lean Canvas for my start ups.<\/p>\n
That led me to think, if business plans and GDDs are so similar, why can’t I use the idea of a canvas for prototyping games? So on March 20th, 2013, I walked into the class at triOS college and drew up a standard business model\/lean canvas on the white board before slowly redesigning the canvas for game prototyping. By the end of the day and some input from others, I’ve managed to get 8 revisions of the canvas and began cranking out a few game prototypes of my own. Two days later, I’ve managed to get two more revisions that I finally thought was refined enough to share.<\/p>\n