In the game development world, a lot of beginners have a rather intense hatred for game prototyping. After all, it usually produces a rushed product that's full of bugs and crappy graphics – a far cry from the uber-sweet, kill-yo-kitten-with-an-axe MMORPG system that they had in mind with all the coolest items, characters and groundbreaking gameplay that they had envisioned themselves making instead.

But the fact remains that prototyping is one of the best ways to quickly – and efficiently – test out game concepts and see which ones work. Not every idea that emerges from your noggin is going to be a gem. In fact, it may well turn out that very few of them will be any good at all. Some developers make dozens of quick game prototypes before settling on a project that they like, and the end product usually reflects all of the pre-work that went into it.

In this piece, you'll be taken step-by-step through a typical prototyping process which, by the end of a few hours, will hopefully be yielding a playable and interesting game.

Starting point: game concept and springboarding

Development time so far: 0 minutes

It's a bit difficult to suggest how one should start on any given prototype. Some people like to engage in freewriting/thinking exercises, clawing all sorts of random ideas from the back of their heads and putting it onto paper so that they can get a better look at their own thought processes. Others favour looking at good and interesting games for inspiration. The remainder probably just sit in a dark room and think really, really hard about stuff for a while.

I favour the idea of what I like to oh-so-snobbishly call "consistent prototyping" – I constantly have a little notepad doccie open on my desktop that I'll jot random words and ideas into whenever something that I've seen, heard or done inspires some game development thought processes deep inside my crazy little noggin.

These ideas are rarely put to use right away: in fact, I like to mature them like a good wine. They could sit inside that document for weeks, months – even years – without me paying them the slightest bit of attention. Then, when I feel like getting a cool prototype out, I look to this mess of notes for inspiration.

In this case, I have a little note somewhere that basically goes along the lines of "Make a typing tutor that's actually FUN". I scribbled this a short while back after reviewing a few tutor programs for an SACM article.

Somewhere further up the page there's a bit of a scrawl entitled "Overkill. Hideously long powerups/big explosions/ridiculous stuff". This probably stemmed from a discussion about Dragonball Z or something.

A little to the side is a note that simply says "Ninjas". I can't remember where this comes from, but it sounds cool anyway.

These concepts have inspired me to create an over-the-top typing trainer that has the player fight enemies using a series of cool "powerups" – in proud anime tradition, the effectiveness of these powerups is determined exclusively by how long it takes to charge up, and how impressive the attack's name sounds when your character belts it out. It's up to you to make sure that the attack name is delivered properly.

Now to lay down some groundworks. Your sources of inspiration may differ, but I'd suggest trying this method as it often gives me fairly nice results and ideas.