Booter developers, I'm curious to hear what tools and techniques you use for game prototype RAD (rapid application development). I'm parked firmly in the free and PC zones. Probably there are much better tools available, but I haven't had the time to set up Eclipse and get a full fledged development environment going... and that might be too heavyweight for just putzing around with some code for fun.

For iPhone game prototyping, I've been using the following setup:

PC with Notepad/Wordpad
HTML, CSS and Javascript
Crude pencil drawings, photographed with my iPad
Paint Shop Pro 7
mongoose, a lightweight web server
a local-only Apple WiFi/Airport Express
an ancient 1st generation iPod Touch

Runester introduced me to mongoose, which is super useful but not very secure. I keep my PC, iTouch, Airport Express on a local-only network when I'm developing (the AE is used primarily to stream music to my stereo and control via iPad). I'm a Notepad warrior when coding, although I may jump back to Vim for keyword highlighting. My images are mostly just pencil scrawls, diced up in PSP7 with some icons and saved pictures. The iPod lets me see what an iPhone user would see, albeit in a somewhat clunky way because it's in Safari.

Two big holes I have are browsing resources and CSS building. Since I keep mongoose completely local and offline, that means use my iPad to google coding resources when I need commands, keywords and code examples. I've been chopping out some basic CSS manually, but again, that is extremely painful. CSS is tough to lay out for a mobile device anyway, and poking around manually involves a lot of typing, picking up the device, refreshing {rinse, repeat} cycles.

Anyone know of some better approaches to streamline this process, or better free tools to speed it along? Or heck, just talk about your own game prototyping rigs, I always like to talk tech.

I've only barely scratched the surface of it, but Android development is very straightforward with Eclipse. If you get the Android dev kit plugin for Eclipse-- it's free from Google -- it comes with an Android emulator for most versions which you can configure to any screen size. That makes prototyping across multiple devices and resolutions a lot easier, since you don't have to have hardware access for alpha development. I'm not a developer by trade or inclination, and even I got that development suite running quickly.

The last time I looked at the Android dev kit, it gave me a nasty headache trying to fit all the pieces together. But that was a while ago, so maybe I'll give it another shot.

Start with Eclipse and do everything from within it as much as possible. It'll save you some of those headaches.

What did you pick for rev control?

Remember the part where I said I wasn't a programmer by trade? Revision control, for me, is saving a copy of a file somewhere else before I try something stupid.

Rev control is an extremely useful tool, but I got frustrated with subversion pretty quickly. It required that you have a UNIX-style shell set up using cygwin, which resulted in some really goofy project structures for Eclipse. It might be the most popular versioning software next to Clearcase, but man that thing was hostile to PCs.

Git is the way and the light.

Okay, I'll look into git. I was surprised to find it available for Windows. I really just need something super lightweight for local development, one developer, and no distributed code. CVS is a fricken sledgehammer, and when it goes wrong, it corrupts your machine pretty bad.

SVN did have the advantage of having Trac, and it's really nice to have a project flow outlined in a webpage/wiki style, including visual diffs.

In your situation, the main perk of Git is topic branches. Personally, I would also set up a remote repo that I would push to when things reach a stable point, purely as an additional backup precaution.

I've heard Mercurial has better Windows integration than Git (I'm not a Windows dev), so that might also be worth checking out for yourself.