THE IMPORTANCE OF PLANNING

Just read through those design documents here and I have been blown away by how detailed they are. I can't even fathom how you would go about planning things to such a degree and being organized enough to continue updating them during development. I'm going to have to play through HR later just to see how all of this factors in to the gameplay.

As for my own planning, I usually don't go beyond deciding what the main party will be, the setting, and any custom game systems that I know will be terribly difficult to add in halfway through development. I don't even come up with villains or any kind of ending until I figure out how my characters are going to behave. Half the time I don't even know where a dungeon is going to end when I start working on it.

I once planned out an ending in advance and halfway through the story decided that with how things had played out thus far there was no possible way the game could end as I had originally envisioned.