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As a person who has previously advised designers to avoid spending time on art and graphics for raw games, my position has changed a bit lately, and I figure this is a good opportunity to lay it out. https://twitter.com/ScottLHillGames/status/1289012402235768832">https://twitter.com/ScottLHil...
First off: specifically, the advice I give isn& #39;t to "not spend time creating art and graphics" for your prototype. It& #39;s to not do it too early in the process.
Late-stage protos that are stable? That& #39;s a good time to flesh out the look of the game a bit more (with the knowledge that the publisher will likely change it).
The reason we give this advice isn& #39;t because spending time on art and graphics on a new proto is objectively bad. It& #39;s because a classic rookie mistake is to spend weeks on graphics for, say, your board, and then find out in your third test that you don& #39;t need a board.
More experienced designers, who have a better idea of what& #39;s unlikely to change, have more flexibility in fleshing out the look of the game early on.
Also, "art and graphics" could really refer to a couple of things: UX/interface (yes, for analog tabletop games), and illustrations/graphic design.
Illustrations and refined graphic design are things you can work around early on. But you should settle on UX/interface issues after you& #39;ve worked out the core of your game.
Here& #39;s an example. In early versions of Battle Merchants, I had Kingdom Cards with no art - just text. No one took them, because they were so hard to parse. It affected playtests.
At some point, I added stock images to the cards, and suddenly, people were taking the cards in testing. The images let them parse and chunk the cards& #39; effects more easily.
If there are graphic design issues that materially affect your tests, that points to UX/interface issues that you should work on.
