Best prototyping tools for a coding newbie?

[TwiNCannoN]

So, my prior gamedev trade is mostly rooted in 3D art, although lately I've found myself in the realm of design and don't foresee coming out anytime soon.

I'm looking for some sort of codebase or language that is really fast and easy to learn in which to prototype small ideas or demonstrations. Right now I've just been looking at Actionscript (a decent choice as I already know basic flash stuff), Processing, and Love 2D. Ideally I'm looking for the ability to create anything from a simple particle effect demonstration up to an actual rudimentary platformer game demonstration, which as far as I've seen all 3 can do; although there doesn't seem to be as many game specific examples for Processing, one of my colleagues does use it for more obscure code prototyping.

I'm not too worried about 3D prototyping, just 2D is fine. There doesn't need to be any fancy graphical support. I have almost zero coding experience (would like to dive a language fully sometime, but won't have the time for at least a year or two).

Does anyone have experience with any of these, or similar software? If there are other options out there I'm not really aware of them so feel free to link/recommend them. Thanks in advance

[Szlia]

I would say the advantage of Flash and ActionScript is that, as it is very popular and very well documented, it's easy to find tutorials, bits of code, tips, etc. It's also easy to add assets in various formats to you project and it allows you to have your prototype run on just about any machine.

The only drawback that I see really is the schizophrenic nature of the design (part scripting, part drawing/compositing/editing) that helps create some very elegant solutions, but also some hellish mess. That and also the performance, since your application is very very far from the hardware. But for 2D gameplay prototypes I guess that should not be an issue.

This is coming from a digital McGyver that had limited programming knowledge before trying to do some mini-games using Flash and managed to do just that pretty fast, even if any real coder would have nightmare for months after seeing how I code things!

[yalammar]

if you have no coding experience and looking for a good tool, thats pretty inexpensive and easy to use, try TGF2 the games factory2, www.clickteam.com. It is a pretty cool interface for drag and drop coding of events. I believe there is a free demo to download on there site and the community is very active with good support forums and hundreds of examples of code to tinker with.