Part 2 - The Preliminary Design / Concept

I'm going to start this project by doing a little design work first. When I used to work at the USDA, I would review proposals from companies bidding on IT projects. Their concepts and specs had to be good because they wanted get the contract and get money. What I'm doing now is nothing like that. This isn't going to be a major project and any docs that I make will only be used by me so I don't need a complete design document. I do feel that I'll need something to help my stay on task. I need a goal and a defined scope.

My goal is to make a game not a text-based game engine; though I will try to organize things into reusable parts. I will make an adventure rpg game. Adventure games work will with just text and that's basically the type of game we used to make in middle school.

Before I can go any further, I need to define the game a little bit more. I should decide on what the game will be about.

Game Name: The Next Tomorrow [size=2](the working title)

This game will be in a steam punk setting on a post-

Earth.

After a war that nearly destroyed the planet, humans have started to rebuild. Over the past 75 years after the

humans have cities again, but the former countries no longer exist. City-states are the only types of governments that still exist.

Goal of the player:

• The player can remain a mercenary and perform quest for money.

My game will have these features:

• A pregame menu system

Internally, the game will have the following:

• Load the world from disk

This is it for the design. It's not complicated right? Are all the details there? No, not yet. Next time I'll build a quick prototype of some of the features that I want to implement. After I make the first prototype, I'll be able to understand what I need to build better and I may be able to think of some new features.