Writing.... on paper Topic

Sit down. Be humble.

1486

05/15/2010 05:21 AM

post=138250
Planning can easily become a waste of time because a good game designer is going to change almost all of it anyway. Sometimes throwing chunks of it in the trash if it just isn't fun.

This applies to pretty much every tangible expressive art forms ever. My sister acts. You wouldn't believe how much concept material that gets thought up for some expressive purpose, never ends up being seen by anyone (except for their brothers which in turn laugh at them).

Max McGee

with sorrow down past the fence

9159

05/15/2010 05:23 AM

I guess the real reason I don't plan is that a devdoc doesn't survive contact with the editor any more often than a battle plan survives contact with the enemy.

Pokemaniac

3559

05/15/2010 05:31 AM

post=138256
I guess the real reason I don't plan is that a devdoc doesn't survive contact with the editor any more often than a battle plan survives contact with the enemy.

I'd say this is a brilliant analogy but most of the time the editor is an enemy.

I don't keep dev docs, I find them to be useless to me. If I was in a proper team(Not like even a group of a few people) I'd need one, but I find that I get nowhere with writing them.

I do plan puzzles that involve some kind of logic(eg Rock sliding puzzles, ice puzzles, etc etc) on paper however because I find it easier to work out. But generally I find them to be full of errors when putting them into the editor so maybe that's not helping either!

WolfCoder

3554

05/15/2010 05:32 AM

...But I have to still plan out the first area to my game or the story will be really confusing and just bad.

Max McGee

with sorrow down past the fence

9159

05/15/2010 05:37 AM

Oh I do PLAN it's just entirely in my head.

I don't plan on paper. The few times I have...spectacular failure. Likewise with my novels I am always several steps ahead of the section I am currently writing, but I don't write outlines.

Pokemaniac

3559

05/15/2010 05:42 AM

One of the reasons I don't bother with documents too is that I trust my head to keep anything relevant. I have the entire of Parallel's plot on memory(although with the game all but cancelled I don't see the use =/), and it will probably stay there for at least a year- more if I was still working on it obviously.

Darken

3952

05/15/2010 05:55 PM

I don't care how well mentally endowed you think you are, writing stuff down really helps. Theres a reason why "sounds good on paper" is very common to describe untested concepts that don't have holes in them.

Yeaster

6164

05/15/2010 11:00 PM

post=138045
I never plan my games on paper. I tend to be creative when the maker is open rather than writing it on paper. Why? Because if I do write it on paper, I will break the barriers of my RM skill and the program itself, therefore making my ideas useless and disappointing me.

That's true for me as well.

It's easier for me to make up things as I go along, and I'll fill up any plot holes or add in/subtract details to make my game cohesive during the test-play stage.

This applies to pretty much every tangible expressive art forms ever. My sister acts. You wouldn't believe how much concept material that gets thought up for some expressive purpose, never ends up being seen by anyone (except for their brothers which in turn laugh at them).

That's true as well. When I write my screenplays, just about the only thing I can keep from the planning stages is the bare basics of the plot-line. Almost everything else -- especially the characters -- have either been significantly changed ~~for the better~~ or discarded.

WRITING.... ON PAPER

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