Another post anticipating the upcoming game creation challenge: Prototyping resources. First I'll be looking at the overall process of designing, prototyping and testing your games. Then I'll provide some practical ideas for prototyping.

Why and What

First, why and how do prototyping when designing a game. In short, you can only see how good your current state of the game design is by playing it. To play it, you need a prototype. A more fancy way of saying this is that game design is a second-order design problem; you are designing a the mechanics of a system but aiming for some specific results (a particular kind of emergence) when the system is in action -- players are playing (with) it.

Eric Zimmerman has written a fantastic article about this process titled 'Play as Research: The Iterative Design Process'. Go and read it!

How? Practical Tips on Prototyping

Practical tips fall into two categories of prototypes -- for physical games (such as board and card games) and digital games.

Physical Games

You don't need to have high production values on your board and card game prototypes but some basic functional needs must be met. If you have a card game you probably need to be able to shuffle the cards and their backsides should probably not identify the cards. Other tokens should be easy to handle, too.

For card games, I'd suggest buying colored sleeves from your local hobby store. There are also those with color only on one side -- you can just print (or write) to normal paper, cut the cards and place them into the sleeves.The resulting deck should be both shufflable (?) and the sleeves hide the contents of the cards to other players.

For tokens I like to use cheap poker chips available from any book store or even those dime stores selling crap. Get many colors to be able to prototype many kinds of games.

Other than that cardboard, magic markers, scissors and glue should pretty much do the job. Bluetack can come in handy when you need to change your "configuration" on the fly. 

Digital Games

First tip is to build a physical prototype of your digital game if you can. You'll get a concrete example of your idea and probably come across some things you need to clarify to make your design complete.

Other than that, I'd recommend you to use Game Maker, especially if are making a single-player game or a 2D game. For testing the user interface and basic mechanics Game Maker is also golden. You don't need to program vey much; all the basic events and actions can be specified by selecting correct icons on the interface.

So, those were my tips. Ian Schreiber has his own on the 4th lesson of Game Design Concepts course . You are more than welcome to share your tips in the comments.

image: rudy and ayok by alimander , creative commons licensed, non-commercial, share alike, attribution