Lumenflower
Yellow Dog
I've often fallen into the trap myself of plunging straight into the heart of a game's development without properly planning ahead. This leads to a rapidly escalating level of complexity which leaves the project difficult to continue developing. I was always taught at school to plan my essays and such before starting to write them, so I don't know why I never seem to take the same approach with game development.
I'm assuming that any successful - and sufficiently large - projects that you lot have produced were backed up by a huge amount of planning beforehand. I get that some games just don't need it (like Flappy Bird) but I'd say anything more complex than that really ought to have a plan in place before development begins.
My question is then how do you structure your plans? Do you write out a full game design document and make sure that's absolutely perfect before writing even your first line of code? Or do you write the first half of the document and then begin developing the game and the document side-by-side? If you later come up with features that weren't considered in your design document, do you try and add them or leave them out to avoid the risk of having the project get too complex?
At a deeper level, do you perhaps plan out your code structure before beginning to write it? Maybe some sort of giant flowchart which shows the inputs and outputs of all your scripts and the ways they interact, but none of the actual code. Do you perhaps write pseudocode first and then write it out properly later? If you produce prototypes for the various mechanics in your game, do you start your project building outward from these prototypes? Or do you start a new project at the very beginning (menus and stuff, I guess?) and implement the prototypes as-and-when they become relevant?
I think knowing how to properly plan projects would massively increase my ability to actually produce games, so I'm eager to find out what approaches work for this community (and indeed which ones don't). Looking forward to hearing your contributions. Sorry if this post lacks structure - ironically I didn't plan it.
Many thanks,
~Druid TC
I'm assuming that any successful - and sufficiently large - projects that you lot have produced were backed up by a huge amount of planning beforehand. I get that some games just don't need it (like Flappy Bird) but I'd say anything more complex than that really ought to have a plan in place before development begins.
My question is then how do you structure your plans? Do you write out a full game design document and make sure that's absolutely perfect before writing even your first line of code? Or do you write the first half of the document and then begin developing the game and the document side-by-side? If you later come up with features that weren't considered in your design document, do you try and add them or leave them out to avoid the risk of having the project get too complex?
At a deeper level, do you perhaps plan out your code structure before beginning to write it? Maybe some sort of giant flowchart which shows the inputs and outputs of all your scripts and the ways they interact, but none of the actual code. Do you perhaps write pseudocode first and then write it out properly later? If you produce prototypes for the various mechanics in your game, do you start your project building outward from these prototypes? Or do you start a new project at the very beginning (menus and stuff, I guess?) and implement the prototypes as-and-when they become relevant?
I think knowing how to properly plan projects would massively increase my ability to actually produce games, so I'm eager to find out what approaches work for this community (and indeed which ones don't). Looking forward to hearing your contributions. Sorry if this post lacks structure - ironically I didn't plan it.
Many thanks,
~Druid TC