How can rapid prototyping save you money on product development?

It extends to every facet of development. If you iterate on a design, fail fast, find the fun, this requires customers/testers and the ability to change fast. If you iterate on art in the same fashion, find the look, make it performant, make it mass producible ( make it outsourcable), make the pipeline solid. Tech art and engineering is the same. Use milestones and deliveries to solidify processes, evaluate leadership, examine pipelines, cut or pivot ect. Plans are great but they need to be loose and tighten as the product solidifies. New IP, new product development is messy, get it done fast, fail fast, and refine. But until you have a customer or a user base your guessing, the sooner you can get feedback the better.

If a game isn't fun without art/assets, it is likely to be just as fun, but more expensive to produce, with said art/assets. Quick example: The paper test when creating a level for a game. It is typical for designers to map out level concepts on paper, and when said concepts are apparent duds, get a new sheet and start again.

You can think of these benefits of rapid prototyping as ways to understand feasibility, desirability, and viability for your idea. Desirability lets you know if your target audience wants it. Feasibility lets you know if you can make it. Viability lets you know if you can make a profit from it.

The important part about any of these tools is starting as cheaply and quickly as possible. How might you generate 10 ideas in 10 minutes? What are the top 3 you might spend 5 minutes on? How might you combine the best ideas of those 3 in a 30 minute design session? The idea here is generate a lot that is cheap so you do not fall in love with the idea. Keep it easy and simple to iterate to find the best solution. Periodically test for viability, feasibility and/or desirability. As these get clearer, you can spend more time making higher fidelity mockups.

Don't feel that you need to set the goal at the beginning. Understand the problem, from multiple perspectives. You can use some rapid prototypes to understand the problem more deeply by testing those prototypes with potential users or customers. As you test, understand their view of the problem and their goal. You can bring this back to refining your goal. Just like you dont want to fall in love with a problem too early, the same goes for a goal.

Combining Design Thinking, Lean Startup, and Agile involves the following steps: Empathize: Understand user needs and pain points. Define: Define the problem and opportunities. Ideate: Generate solutions. Lean Startup Validation: Validate ideas quickly. Agile Planning: Plan and execute with flexibility. Prototype and Test: Test with a larger group. Iterate: Improve based on feedback. Implement: Execute the final solution. Continuous Feedback: Gather ongoing feedback. Measure and Optimize: Use data for optimization.

Keep your prototypes as thorough as the go live state of your production interfaces, this includes every content copy, user journey flows. A rookie mistake I see most product teams do is use design as indicative. Instead, make it conclusive with every minute detail, as good as the software deployed in a real world use case for eg at a bank branch. This detailing helps your end users experience the product much ahead of the development cycle & any changes can be easily incorporated in the backend architecture today. Makes lives of everyone much more clear - customers, engineers, product managers & business stakeholders.