I was wondering if people could evaluate my game design process. What needs improvement or did I forget something, those type of thing.

I would also appreciate it if you were to critique my art pipeline.



Thanks to everyone for the help.

Quote - "The "Game Design" you have at the beginning should be an iterative process over the course of the first and third quarters of development. ... And so on."

- thats why I have "Continual work and design document revisions"

Quote - "Development Flowcharts like you presented are just a paper dream."

- what is a better alternative? If I am not organized at least somewhat then how will anything get done? Should I then just make a help wanted thread that reads "No real plan but a good idea....seeking all positions....will have idea what you do later." I appreciate the help though, I am just wondering then how I should go about organization because, lets face it; the idea of recruiting an entire team and organizing them over a long period of time where they are going to leave and we have to recruit someone new is flawed and rarely works. Any suggestions?

Quote:Original post by frob
Development Flowcharts like you presented are just a paper dream.

Better to go in with a plan than with no plan at all.

I just think you sort of over complicated it. The software development life cycle is exactly that, a cycle.

Development usually goes from
Planning
Analysis
Design
Implementation
Support
then goes back to the top.

Gaining people in the beginning is not always the best thing, and reason being that it will be harder to recruit skilled people. If you post just the game design or just that you are making a game, people will just think that it is a project destined to fail. But, if you have the game design, the technical design document, and an overall plan of everything, people will know that you are serious about developing a game and will attract skilled people.

Thats good advice. I appreciate it; I dont want to rush into it with the slogan of "follow me and lets make a game from my idea". Rather I just want to use my skills to attract and accumalate a small team of the right people with the right mindset. Then we recruit people as we need them (but not so many at a time). I would rather do things slow and right: using knowledge and planning to build a team rather then to use hype to generate as many members as possible where we all sit around hyped and ready but collectivly multidirectional and scattered.

Appreciate the help from both of you, Thanks.

The link of image is broken.

Here's my suggested process:

Start small, with a core team. Let everybody on the core team help with the story and the gameplay. Work until you have the main character/s defined, and the main gameplay defined, and know what the different themes through the game will be, with some concept art. If you need to build tools or technology, build enough that you know what to do, and so you can produce art that won't need to be re-produced. This is the pre-production phase.

Then, load up on team members, and leave each of the themes of the game to a separate group, where each group works much like the pre-production group initially worked. The original team leads the charge, and jumps in to fire-fight where necessary. At each step, start small, get something working, and then expand on that; making sure you have something complete, playable, and testable at least every month. Test early and often -- if something doesn't work; change it early to avoid wasting too much time.

For any big piece (theme, technology, or art pipe) that isn't actually done at the end of pre-production, schedule that early to manage risk, and be prepared to do without.

Also, you should hire an experienced test lead in pre-production, to start building test environment and test your pre-production work. I would also make sure there's an experienced manager involved -- this is typically NOT your lead designer, lead artist, or lead tech guy; the skills are very different.