ID:65715
 
As much as I like to see results, I have to say that a lot of my motivation in developing Project Cyberverse was thwarted by a single thing: I didn't plan the whole thing out.

Consequently, I reached a certain point, relatively early into the project, where I asked myself, "okay, what's next?" I had pretty much hit Game Designer's block; I had a non-game; Shelving was inevitable.

Yesterday, I pulled out a nice book of graphing paper and started to try to resolve that issue. The early results have been dramatic. I've probably gone through about 3 or 4 games worth of refinement without writing a single line of code.

So, if I have any point to make here, it's this: plan everything out first. If completing a game is important to you, you should have a completely playable game from start to finish planned out well enough that you can run through it in your head.

If you feel you can't plan everything out first, then do what I did. Keep trying until you keep running smack into a wall of having not planned everything out. Do it as many times as it takes for your subconscious mind to realize that you do, in fact, need to plan everything out. Then, plan everything out first.

It's looking right now that I'm going to unshelve Project Cyberverse, but with a much more coherent focus now. It's not quite reached the point where the game is completely playable in my head, but the subconscious has been chewing heavily on it all night, and now I suspect I might just be one morning's planning away from having a complete design on paper.
I think personally, many of us just love to toil in the creation process more than code. ;)

I've been where you are and have been making my own attempts to avoid the situation by shortning up my end goals and development cycles.

Make a V1 which is playable with a sub-set of features. Not all games support this method but if your can, consider it.

Really trim the fat down and then take good breaks (to toil about whats next) between your development pushes.

This gets you feedback and direction at each release. This is commonly referred to as scrum based develeopment. There are other names for it. Try looking it up on wikipedia.org. Should be a good read if anything.

Keep it up though and do whatever it takes to reach the end game. :)

ts
Interesting stuff, and not too different from the approach I'm beginning to adapt, except for one vital difference: they don't give up if some feature they agreed to implement rubs them the wrong way, they just keep going for the agreed upon coding period.

I should probably skip right to that method, given that my tendency to halt progress whenever something strikes me as the least bit off is likely to perpetually stalemate any attempts to create something.

I enjoy coding insofar as I like seeing the electric gears turn the directions I command, in a perhaps megalomaniacal manner, but when bereft of the outer purpose of a design that produces fruit my motivation deserts me nonetheless.
Tsfreaks wrote:
I think personally, many of us just love to toil in the creation process more than code. ;)

This is me, alright! I'm first and foremost a designer and creator... All of the work involved in getting to a finished product basically falls into the "necessary evil" category to me, rather than a pasttime itself... It's just a means to an end of seeing my ideas in action...

Even the art (which tends to be the part I like most about the creation process) eventually feels like a chore (to the point that some items on my To Do list have gone unfinished for quite some time simply because I need to draw some icons for them)
I've been there.

(Note screenshots are probably long gone now.)
As for the topic at hand, I was thinking about it, and I guess I don't really plan very well ahead of time... I tend to get a general idea, knock out the basic details, then go back and flesh things out as I go...

I tend to do a lot of brainstorming away from the computer, though (most generally at work), and I have a large stack of notes I've jotted down during those times, so in chunks here and there, much of my work is planned out, but never the entire thing all at once before work begins...

I need the instant gratification of getting something up and running (complete with icons; I never use placeholders) right away, and can't really wait through an entire pen-and-paper development phase...

Though it does catch up to me with extended periods of designer's block... I've gone through a lot of time just staring at Dream Maker and not really touching anything... These periods are generally followed by a flood of ideas and work, though... Once the dam breaks, it really breaks...
I'm very similar in that I like that instant gratification as well. I think the trouble is that I want to design something that's pretty darn complicated.

I can get by on notes to an extent - maybe a lot of notes for something relatively complicated - but there reaches a certain point of complication where I need to figure out how Tab X391 fits into Slot Y149 before I dare touch the code.

If you can play the game from start to finish in your head, that's about the point where you've probably done enough design. I qualify that by saying that any detail you don't sweat now you'll be sweating later, but with adequate practice you'll be much better at identifying which details can wait.