This post is a little belated, however
better late then never. For the FLOSS seminar
I had to create a paper prototype of my game idea.
My idea was a combination of the bejeweled mechanic,
and the hacking minigame from bioshock. The prototype
I created was a lot of little paper squares with different
types of pipes on them. The goal was to turn and switch the
squares to complete pipes. During the play testing several
different variations were tossed around. This was helpful
in identifying what mechanics I wanted to focus on. It
also helped to start balancing the game and making it
easy enough to be casual, but challenging enough to
maintain interest. In the end the class
decided on 3 games to develop, sadly mine was not one
of them, however I did join a team developing a
modified version of robocode, a programming game.p