Putting it all back together
Once you have found your references, deconstructed them, taken the most significant elements as a base to develop your mechanics, and finally, added or taken out whatever you needed to achieve your gameplay vision, it is finally time to test whether it really works!
At this point, you are probably not yet writing detailed documentation for the rest of the team. Most likely, you are in some sort of prototyping phase. Especially with core mechanics, the only way to test your hypothesis (of fun) is to play them.
We will discuss later how to effectively prototype game mechanics and flows. For now, it is important that you understand that the process of creating new mechanics goes hand in hand with working software.
The only way to know whether your character’s jump needs to follow realistic physics or not, what the speed at which it is performed should be, and the maximum height is to play the game and feel whether your design assumptions were...