With next week officially now being nearly 10 weeks since I started "Preping" up my next creation masterpiece, "Stock Ticker," I thought I would like to ask a question to everybody in the community, in exactly, "How long do you 'Prep' your games up for before officially starting them in the editor?"

When it comes to making a game, some people can just be thrown into something on the spot, without no real planning, and immediately start making / creating something and sometimes it turns into 'Wonder Bread;' for others, people like to take about a week or two of planning before any real work gets done. But, have any of you ACTUALLY planned out a game for 10, 12, 16, or even longer amount of weeks before even starting your game?

The advantage of planning a game much longer is that when it comes to adding a weapon, creating a map, coming up with a character bio -- everything is already done for you -- you just need to plug in the holes and it will save you a lot of headaches down the road. But, on the other hand, planning a game for that long may bore the creator and he or she may have already given up on the project, long ago, looking to do another project which doesn't waste as much time as the previous one.

Now, although it has been around 9 weeks, I like my project, and don't even mind spending another 6 more weeks or more planning out all the details -- but what about you guys? How much time do you allow yourselves to take in order to plan out a game?

I've been developing my game (on and off) for over a year now.


It's not boring at all. I mean you have the world, the story, the characters, the skills, the equipment, the monsters, the items and all the other features in your game to plan out.

For me I want to finish the design of a project before I begin creating it. That way I know where I'm going with it, what I expect out of it, and I know I don't have to go back and change a bunch of stuff when I'm halfway through the project. Granted, there will be some things I'll think up later, but I want to have the core unaffected by those changes. Those would be things like sidequests or a new crafting system. As long as the only changes are adding instead of subtracting and then adding to the game.

This one is kinda hard for me to answer, considering my current projects are adaptations of a novel I've written.
That being said however, I've spent over a year collecting resources, learning how to make my own graphics, learning how to use the program - on top of planning out each area.

I prefer to have each area thoroughly thought out and pre-planned before I even start attempting to map it out. It makes it so much easier to map when you already know where everything is in your head. Even thought I've spent this long on these projects, I'm far from bored with them.

depends on the game. for the remake game, since most of the design decisions have already been made, planning is relatively simple. but for my second future project, this will take a long time since I have a lot more content to think up.

First of all, thanks Brent!

Why? Because I thought I was the only one brainstorming my game for over 6 weeks..

I have done a remake game before, and that did not need any brainstorm. The only few things I did while working on it was throwing some more developed dialogging and re-do the maps.. Now, I am working own my very first project from scratch.

Before touching the editor I want to have all the storyline writing down, the major events, background story for the world and list the 'cool' things I see while playing other games. If the game that the author is creating has a mature sense to it, no doubt that the author will stick with it and maybe change little things while brainstorming it over a period of time.

The best thing I consider about brainstorming it, before even starting in the editor is how you get emotionally attached to your characters and how they will interact in that certain event.

Cheers

I really have no choice as my editor of choice will not be completd or in working order until 2012. Therefore I must wait a whole year before I can even start actually making it. I do have lots of time to make artwork for every character, plan out maps, and other things of that sort though.

I come up with game ideas right on the spot like crazy! Although, sometimes it gets me to start on another project which can be a big flaw. As for some things, I just go on making the game, and create things as I go.

PROS:
-Good for fitting your fan's needs.
-Fits MY needs and idea making.

CONS:
-Can sometimes end up un-checking something (AKA Flaw).
-Unplanned.

That is why it seems I have so many games.

I create my game on the spot, that way it will be more exiting making it then knowing what will happen next.
Seems like that to me anyways.
I can't do art or sprites so that's my only decision I can make

3 weeks for me, atleast 3 weeks of planning the story, and some or if not most of the music used in the game. That was BEFORE I even started using RM. I had it started on Game Maker 8 back then till I figured "Hey.. why not check out RPG Maker" the reason I wasn't using it already was because it wouldn't run on my old laptop (it was 600x480 screen TINY) and when I was doing research on it I couldn't find anything good about it.

Kailis took me 4 official years of planning before development, and it had 5 years of physical development as well as 2 years of those 5 were spent as reinforcing story and concept development.

I honestly feel that no matter how much development is put into a game, there will always be flaws in development. Problems arise and not all fans will be satisfied with what you do, it'll never be long enough, and always be craving more, especially the more you give them and deeper story it is. The only solution I can see for this is to make a continously developing video game, aka... expansion packs. But after some time players may give up or find the story outrageous or want it to end. So... in my eyes plan for expansions, plan well into development and have a solid end that cannot portray any sign of continuation in the storyline.

Very interesting view on things, Axerax. They are also very true.

Well my game will have some replay value before I make the sequel (It's going to have a 2nd game, possibly a 3rd but not likely unless I can make it a convincing 3rd game) as there is a Good and Evil system, the main character is generally evil, however you can still be a good guy throughout the game, which will provide different rewards or consequences than if you played it all out evil. There will also be 2-3 endings (I'm not sure about the 3rd ending I planned and whether or not it will be liked).

Shit, man, now I don't feel so bad if I plan something for about 12 weeks before starting ANYTHING now after hearing how long you had to take before starting *hot damn!* (I would go crazy if I had to work on anything for more than a year, two tops).

And yeah, your right, no matter how long you take to make something, there will always be something wrong or something that wasn't done up to the standards that you set when you first started the project; and, it's funny, because sometimes a game that was completed in a few weeks can beat the pants off something that took many years to make...

Just goes to show, it doesn't matter how long you take to finish a game, just finish and roll with it, and who knows what might happen?

One game I created took me 2 weeks of very simple planning. Another I just got into it as I was designing up from an already designed game, and it simply developed over time. (I'm actually quite skilled as a game modifier)

I think the traits of a lead designer is the ability to look realistically at a project and give it a definite start and end, and lock in all the gameplay for it with a few margins for change. They then pour themselves into it, and just dig passionately into the design like an artist working their paintbrush.

For me, I prefer to have tangible aspects. I write up a story and then I let it marinate. After I feel the idea has cooked thoroughly, and isn't half-baked, I begin drawing the characters. Once the characters and some concept art is finished, I begin to conceive gameplay. The gameplay is a lot of work. Stat growth, balance, weapons, etc. After all that I'm ready to crack open RMVX/RMXP.

It's about a 3month process in all + 1-2 months for marinating an idea. It's fun though.

This reminds me of a cooking class that leads to child birth lol.

Honestly I don't see how you develop Statistical Balancing wihtout actually utilizing the system, knowing how every method and value works, while at the same time being able to manipulate it for your own game. This in my mind is impossible without trial and error via the game engine. Unless you're making the stats yourself, you should always test in game with stuff like that. New battle systems can actually change the values to accomodate for unique stats or even use more than 1 stat to make a unique trait value. I.E. Dex+Agi could influence your chances of criticals, dodge, critical miss, and critical dodge all at the same time...while giving a new value of ranged damage base is affected by these two combined and divided by 0.3 or something like that.

Concept art should always come before character art. It's easy to draw a rough sketch of a few islands, a scene or two specific you have in mind, important key objects or events, etc. Where characters should be at first loosely drawn, then summed up and finalized after a few more re-creations of the characters.

You can only give a definite start and end if you know your assets that work with the game will stay there to see final production. If you're planning to make it all yourself, you can do the same, but I highly doubt it'll be a true work of art, if you give yourself a deadline that seems feasable at first, and closer to time is too soon. Always give a bit of looseness when setting deadlines, cause you're better off being flexible.

Working from a predesigned game is always easy, it isn't rocket science to do this. All you need to have is an understanding of their formulas, styles, and methods. Everything else just comes easy after that.

statistic balance is generally is not something that you can simply crunch out via spread sheets unless your game is so simple that it is solvable. And that's a bad thing, trust me. If your game is solvable to you, it's solvable to your players, and that means this game will have exactly one play through before people say, "okay, I know all there is know about this game" and quit.

Paradoxically, you need to try to attain game play balance. Now, if your game is the type that has a big player base, where you are getting feedback from them and you can go through multiple iterations of the same game, fantastic, you can just keep fine tuning the numbers. But often, that's not a luxury that game devs have. so a lot of the balancing work needs to happen before the game ships.

different game devs handle balance differently though. D&D 4th edition development staff started out with a philosophical guideline. ("at your current level, you should always hit 50% of the time"), Sirlin (of Street Fighter 2 HDRemix fame) says you have to explore the design space (i.e. giving your characters abilities that might not have a numerical effect), but the important thing is, the balancing act happens quite early.

I pretty much just come up with a concept and hop right to the editor.

Course I make non-standard games (no combat, suicide, sex, drugs, even incest, etc. as themes) so I dunno if they're "wonder bread."

Only game I'm going back to polish up is Haven 2 has I got two reviews saying to skip it, which makes me want to make the game better. Not that it was bad, lacked polish and certain elements (not enough showing of the plot, too much telling).

Hello,

Lol yes, it would make most people do the same. I prefer to have a solid story that is not of the same origin as most games. In short, I don't like to be cliche... But in its own right mind, doing such is cliche in itself. Anyways. I really enjoyed planning for that long, it let me feel closer to the characters, as if I know them rather than acknowledge them. It's hard to explain this, but they feel real when I speak of them, as if they were a real person. I think about their thoughts, feelings, emotions, and presence. Maybe I am a good writer for this, but I only do it because I want to have characters that can draw the same things that I think about of these characters out of the player. If the character loses his/her best friend, a vital party member, I want them to feel sadness that the player is feeling. It's truely remarkable to see a player cry sympathetically towards a fictional character. I've only experienced a few games that do this to me, and those games are always my instant favorites.

Some of the best games are as you said... The Dragon Age series for instance. This series is now on it's 2nd game, and also they have 1 expansion and multiple DLC's for the first game. The game was originally simply a tribute to a classic Bioware game, Baulder's Gate. It was a quick fix game to make money while Bioware was cranking out the Mass Effect trilogy. And now something so small only a mini fanbase who knew of it's existance, was a game of the year, well known, and quite popular if not more popular than Mass Effect is!

That statement and question is exactly what I was saying in short. It's very true. I could work for ages, but it doesn't mean people will love it or it'll be a classic, only time will tell.

elliot20: You hit the nail on the head, piggy backing with some more information that I didn't mention before, it's exaclty what I was saying though.

Cleril: My teams newest project, Unseen, is a non-combat game. It's all puzzle based. It's quite fun to work with and it'll draw a unique fanbase. But those sorts of games tend to draw specific types of game players.

You'll have to forgive me, I'm rather loosely using terminology to describe my actions. My concept art so far is primarily character art, but since only two drawings are of characters and the other 2 are of nameless monsters and the last is of a scene at the end of the game, I categorized the last three as concept art where-as that's not really what 2 of them are. I suppose if I threw backgrounds on the monsters it'd be concept art, which I may do.

Anyways, it was all just a sum-up. There's really a f***-ton more work involved then what I said. I just didn't feel like writing an essay at the time explaining game-theory & design or something equally complex and I know not the technical terms for.

elliot20 is quite right though, and sums up the balancing aspect in a nice, simple package.

There are important aspects to the game that should probably be developed before physical work is done on the project itself. Whether you create gameplay or story first is a matter of preference. Some of the best games meld the two, though, and I think creating a skeleton of the story first will benefit the player the most. However, there is no benefit if the story is created without gameplay in mind. A story that doesn't encourage random encounters and battles in a logical manner could become more of an interactive story than an actual game, which appeals to a much smaller audience.

So I begin my skeleton first. A rundown of scenes and events that happen in sequence which pose great significance. I try to keep gameplay in mind during this portion as well, so battles can happen. I then create the gameplay. This begins with a battle system. RM has a lot of work done for you, and you can decide what to do with it. Tweak the formulas and add on to it with scripts or leave it at default. Expand the stats. I then return to a look at the story, and decide what story elements the gameplay can absorb, and if there's additional systems that won't hinder the story. (You can't have a dragon raising system in a story that doesn't support it, but if the story revolves around this then you can make this an interactive part of your game.) I also decide what classes are appropriate, etc. etc. Gameplay relevant ideas that are story-centric. Suikoden has runes, FF8 has Junctions, FF7 has Materia, The Way has Shadow Blades.

I continue to develop them simultaneously, making sure I finish plotting the game's engines first and what I like to do. Once the engines are finalized (Easy part if you're using a pre-made game engine.) I return to the story, and add in the meat to the skeleton. From there I create battles and bosses and enemies based on the engine I've made.

You want to do as much as you can on paper before you start, because it's a f***-ton easier to change something on paper than it is to change something that's already implemented. So after the game engine and the final story and the monsters and battles I'm done.

Here is a deeper look at how I do story:

I begin with big events. A,B,C,D,E, A1, B1, etc. These change the game significantly and deal directly with the deepest parts of the plot. EX:

A. Game Starts.
B. You meet Walden.
C. You and Walden are captured by pirates.
D. You and Walden escape capture only to find out Walden is the Pirate Captain and he's stolen your World-Raping-Orb you were suppose to keep safe as per your grandpa.
E. You stow away on a military boat, and run into Jack O'Lanty, a Naval Officer who is actually wanting to find Walden and get revenge, since Walden is his father who abandoned him and his mother at a young age.
F. The World-Raping-Orb has a special power to draw the last person holding it to it's location, and Jack abandons post to follow you to it.
G. Around the next port, you run into Walden's gang but with no sight of Walden. They recognize you, and you get into a scuffle that's definitely gonna end badly for you. Suddenly, a clumsy but effective young Tai-Fu monk pops in and saves you. You greet him quickly and begin scouring the area and he follows you for some reason.
H. When you ask why, he pauses and exclaims "It's destiny! I can feel it, I was meant to follow you! Please, let me!" Little do you know, and it's not explained, but this Monk was the one who last touched the orb before you and has been tracking you down.

I begin with something like that. It's real easy, real simple, fast, effective. It creates the skeleton that is the story. This will give me an idea of what the main classes we're looking at are as well. Once it's all completed it will tell me what the biggest plot-points are and what kind of gameplay can be added to it. This also helps me create this next portion, the character bios.

You'll want to make the bios after the skeleton. This will assist you greatly when forming the muscle of the story which goes into further detail on a character's actions. The bios should be chalk full of notes and allow you to grow closer to the character as a person. Everyone does their character bios differently, but the personal bio should always include details the public one doesn't, such as the characters primary emotion, the emotions you want to them to evoke, their fears and wants and dreams, their pet peeves, things like that.

The next part of story-plotting is the muscle. These are any events that progress the game. I number these and they look like this:

Ex.

1. You wake up, you're in bed. A snippet of story appears.
2. You slide out of bed and head over to another room, and close the door. Character is off-screen. More snippets of story.
3. Your character appears dressed and ready for the day. More snippets.
4. You head out towards the door, and leave. More snippets.
5. The screen flashes to a picture of a city engulfed in flames like a distant memory. More snippets.
6. You now have free control of your character outside of a hovel in a city. The area is dingy and run down.
7a. If you head to the Market District, the guards shove you down and tell you to stay out. Your disdain for the city increases 1.
7b. If you head through the back alley, you can sneak into the Market District.
...
41. You leave the city with the Beggar King.
42. You follow the trail to the Redwood Forest.

If I'm making a game with rather large story-branching I may create a flow-chart on paper or with a program. If it's a linear game, I do what you see up there.

From there comes the side-questing. I create a separate list of side-quests and minor NPCs and where they appear in the game's muscle. I.E:

Asshole Guard @ 7a.
Nosy Beggar @ 8

41 - 42. A cave is off on a side path. See Flow Chart 41-42 for details.
a. The hidden treasure in this cave is a stash of gold and a Hallowed Blade.
b. The boss is 1 Female White Lion and 1 Male White Lion.

I use flow-charts for dungeons, but for the main events I keep them in the list.

And lastly comes the dialogue. Combined with side-questing, this is the skin and ligaments. The dialogue is the written communication in the game.

@1 " In light of everything, it could be worse. I could be dead . . . "
@2 " But some days that sweet reprieve feels like a luxury I wish I had."
@2 " I don't belong here. I committed no crime, I was educated by the city's scholars."
@3 " No one here will give me a chance. They think all us refugees are the same."
@4 " And maybe they're right. We were all there. We all saw what happened. For that reason we are all linked."
@5 " Linked to the day when our city was annihilated and every pureblood was killed."
@5 " I wouldn't let my kind in either if there was a chance of that happening to my city."
@7a Guard: "Hey, no dirty beggars allowed. Go find a rat and eat that, or buy some rotten fruit from those idiot foreigners that peddle there wares here."

This is how I sketch out a game for RM before getting the physical work done. Works pretty nicely.

As you can see on big games this takes a long time, on little games like my current project, it isn't a terribly long process. But because I work, it is a slow process.