KYUKETSUKI'S PROFILE

I suppose the thread's title pretty much sums up everything I wish to talk about, but of course I can't just leave a one line/blank post to start with.

How do you guys prefer to design/plan your games? The two most popular styles seem to be either designing the game as you go along, or planning out a large portion of the game before implementing anything, and perhaps a third method of occasionally combining each method. While the former method has the benefit of being able to actually see if your ideas are actually possible with the software at hand as well as be able to make it fit better in your game, I find myself usually leaning towards "pre-development planning". I have so many text files on my computer with lists of characters, locations, stories, equipment, skills and many other things that only occasionally actually get put into a real project. That said, this sort of planning often gives me more than I can chew, especially when I tend to usually wipe out the entire database upon starting a new project (you'd think after using RPG Makers for nearly 10 years I'd have the smarts to just create a project with a blank database and only copy/paste it when I decide to start a new project, but not quite...).

However, I suppose that leads into my second question: for those that wish to plan out a structure for their game before actually implementing/designing anything, how long do your "pre-development planning" sessions last for? Or, I suppose to reword the question in the opposite way but with the same meaning, when do you decide the planning phase is finished, or how long does it regularly take until you have something legitimately cohesive that could be turned into a real project with an actually fair chance of being completed? I know that the answers to these questions are all context-based, as not every project is the exact same regardless of their similarity, but I can only assume that people have their limits to how long they can think about a project before actually getting down to business and making it a reality.

Finally, as a bit of a spin off question, how much of your game do you generally like to plan out before truly making anything? The idea of planning out the entirety of a game from its beginning to its ending in text files is seemingly unrealistic for numerous reasons, but nonetheless all of your planned gameplay features mean nothing if there isn't even an excuse plot of a story to connect them and give you a reason to continue playing, and likewise unless you're developing a visual novel a 60+ hour epic story doesn't mean shit if you don't have a fun game to play and, again, give you a reason to care about it (though, personally, I have no experience with games that have great stories but terrible gameplay, but that's a bit off topic). I suppose this comes back to the idea of combining both development methods by starting with a basic, pre-planned out game and story structure while the rest is made up on the spot, but this also comes with risking implementing ideas that either serve no purpose or don't fit with the original structure, and doing so would of course ultimately bring the game down. Perhaps this can be excused with the fact that all of us are indie game developers (not that being such makes us either better or worse than triple A developers), and therefore expectations for our games are noticeably lowered, and not to mention that fat/padding is only a problem depending on how much of it there is, but while I don't expect anyone, including myself, in the RPG Maker to be a game developing deity I was also raised on not doing things at all if you don't do them right, so while I don't ever believe I'll be perfect at anything I would still prefer to do something knowing what the generally accepted best/most successful method of doing it is.