[POLL] HOW MUCH “PLANNING” OR “PREPPING” DO YOU DO BEFORE STARTING YOUR GAME(S)?

This is my first project, and I really didn't had a plan, I just follow the tutorials and suddenly I decided to make a real game. lets see what will happen in the end :P

After 12 years of development my game pretty much still consists of nothing but planning. I think I do too much planning and not enough gam mak.

I do a fair amount of planning. I want to have the basic outlines down for the main story, and details about some main events. I want to have an idea of the world it's going to take place in. I want some ideas for the main characters before I start.
But I always leave enough room for ideas that I come up with on the spot, when I'm making the game. If I already have planned everything I want to do, I get bored making it.

I tend to have a lot of game ideas (especially when working on other projects), so I usually write them all down somewhere so I have a jumping off point for new projects. I try to plan out the basics of gameplay and mood before I start making anything concrete, that way, I'm a bit more organized, I have a checklist, and I know what I'm aiming for - organization helps me stay productive.

However, I never have a solid, 100% complete plan for a game beforehand. For one, I always have great ideas and adjustments midway through and sometimes they're worth adding - working alone or in small teams, you have a lot more malleability with your ideas. Plus, coming up with ideas and just rolling with them is half the fun of game development! If the game was already 100% designed and just needed to be coded/arted, the whole process would be less interesting.

After making a few long stories these past six years, I learned the value of planning in regards to storytelling. Good planning always allowed me to make a story that had more technical storytelling. Game making is turning out to be the same way.

Role-playing games, quintessentially story-based, benefit from this style of planning. The biggest benefit is to be able to change something for the better before underlying mechanisms become too complicated or delicate to touch. It isn't like a novel, where passages can be re-written simply by using strokes on a keyboard; Role-playing game making involves harmony between the story, graphics, music, sound, and maybe even the gameplay. A human brain isn't well-equipped to juggle all of those things on the fly.

Not enough planning makes messy and inconsistent games.
Too much planning prevents you from finishing and releasing games.

Good planning isn't necessarily long planning. It's more about how confident you are in your design ideas and how much of every aspect and feature you covered. There are some projects I wrote down under 2 hours and believe are excellent, others I've been working on for years, changing and tweaking stuff here and there, and there are projects I abandoned but browse through from time to time to pickup ideas that would fit well in a newer project.

Planning is the perfect time to give your ideas a second thought and make sure everything is as good as it can be, because when you begin to work on a game too soon there's a chance you might end up changing major things and having wasted your time.

That being said, good planning also takes place during the production phase. It is highly likely you will have to make adjustments, compromises and change stuff during production, so write down the necessary changes and make sure they fit well with the rest.

haha Yeah, it seems like it's doesn't put a relative value on the amount of work one does. If someone planned the whole thing, that could be considered "enough to know what I'm doing". Since it's not likely that one can plan for the unexpected. Sometimes just thinking of the name of a game can be enough to know what you're doing.

Far too much, and that seems to be my downfall. Make sure too not spend too much time over-thinking the game; I've spent 2 months thinking about my story, and yet I only have the premise and basic events down for now. Depends on what kind of person you are in the end, but I've found that you can discover lots about your game by actually making it.

I guess I'm the second vote for Plan The Whole Thing.
Started with the storyline. Defined how gameplay would work. Filled out the databases. Moved into custom graphics. Assembled the music collection. Didn't start making anything playable until damn near everything else was done.
Even now I plan the next stage using MS Paint before I open map editor and start dropping tiles.