To avoid spending years, untold millions and and suffering unimaginable heartache, it is best to build a Minimum Viable Product of your proposed game as quickly as possible, and then test it with real end users.

But how do you go about designing such a thing? Lets go through some design principles of getting your vision into a playable state as soon as possible.

Tuomas Pirinen is a Game Director, Design Director, and Producer on various titles from triple-A to pen-and-paper games with over 23 years of experience. His specialties are game mechanics design, evangelizing projects, team leadership, vision-holding IP creation, Crowdfunding.