Once you get your idea on paper you may want to make a prototype of the idea.
A prototype doesn’t have to look great; as long as one can convey the basics of the idea it should be sufficient.
Why would it be sufficient? It will be sufficient because one will re-write the code to preform at optimal levels and polish everything up if the game gets past the prototype stage. Spending time making a polished product during the prototype stage is almost a waste of time because the idea can still get scrapped and in some cases one may become attached to the idea when a large amount of time is invested, even if it is bad.
Here is a link to a post talking about prototypes, I thought it was interesting.
So now, here is a picture of a prototype I made for my last blog post.
As you can see my prototype looks pretty bland; however, it has some of the functionality that my 1 page document had. Each player can fire three different types of shots (I didn’t include allowing them to choose their shots, yet), there is no menu screen, etc.. Overall, I have the basic of idea of how I want to implement the functionality into the game.
I am going to develop this prototype further. I showed it to some friends and they enjoyed the overall concept and commented on what they thought it may need. Usually I would also ask random people for feedback, but in this case I am not too concerned about the general outcome of the project and am doing it more for practice.
I am going to start work on making this prototype into more of a demo game now and I will post more information about it as I go.