Why design?
This is an easy one. So we know what we are aiming for. A professional game design can easily take 6 months to fully produce.
- The initial game idea should typically be a single page of A4. If
you can't sell the core concept to an audience (whatever that audience
may be) in a single sheet of A4 the concept probably isn't any good.
- Once a single sheet design is complete we work it up into a short
high level design document. The purpose of this is to flesh out some of
the core concepts, give examples of end user experience, think about
costs of development, team skills required and basically try to identify
glaring holes.
- After a high level design you starting to hit the detailed design
documents. They are called by various names by different people and each
type of document fulfils different end goals.
- Functional spec. Details games rules, and how to play the game.
- Technical design document. This is the "how it works" from a
technology point of view. Are we shader 2.0 only, do we support TCP/IP
or UDP only?
- Test Strategy and scripts. Written from the functional spec.
- Project plan. A detailed, per milestone per resource implementation
plan.
- A number of steps may have to be achieved before the above can be
written.
- Proof of Concept. This is technology investigations. This could take
weeks to months depending on the size of the thing that you need to
prove.
- Paper board game. One of my personal favourites. Not sure how the
game will actually play out? Build a paper version. RTS games are easily
modelled this way.
What game are we going to do then?
Machines 2 - Rampaging Robots
1.1 One Page Game Idea
1.2 Cut Down Engine Design
After those initial documents we move onto
2. Creating a Project