One of my friends and myself have been throwing around some ideas about a singleplayer game that we'd like to start working on soon. Our ideas are on the same page, he's definately a better writer than me, but the question that I have is not about writing (well, it actually is, but more about how to go about writing). What should the extent be that we write out the first episode of this game? What my idea was, was to write out basically a screen play and then work from there with dialogue, puzzles, and the such. But now I'm starting to think that may not exactly be the right way to go - I'm thinking we may not need to go that deep into the writing phase. But I think we'll eventually be writing dialogue (obviously!) so would it be better just to go that route? Or a mixture of the two? Thanks everyone.

Since this is your first game, or so I understood it at least. You should start out pretty small.

Write a draft over the first chapter and try to set the "stage" for your game world. From that, try to derive what puzzles types etc would fit into that game world. This is to set the game mechanics and help flesh out what needs to be programmed/created. When you've got that part try to iterativly turn your draft into "done", small steps. I.e. figuring out the exact puzzle and then implementing it, what happens after the puzzle? etc.

When you've completed the first chapter you should have a pretty good knowledge of what you should and can do. After that you can write the rest as specific as you want and then start implementing. But you should expect changes into your document, i.e. something that looked good in the document didn't turn out so well in the game so it has been removed/changed and thus affects some other parts of the document.

Hope this helps you get started =)

Well this is my first singleplayer game that has needed a story; I've worked mainly on the multiplayer modification aspect of a few games (none notable). I think that was the idea we were going to go with also; basically create the first level, and then move on from there. The ideas are just flowing now; need to start to think straight.

This is basically what Im doing as well. My first release game is going to be a short RPG that will get me into the writing/puzzle aspects and have simplified programming (its going to be top-down). Im also working on ideas right now for a bigger, more complex game. As I work on the story requirements for the short version, Im also thinking of what I'll need to develop the longer one. One thing Im trying to get a head start on is keeping track of what sort of tools I'll need. I'm writing my own script engine for NPCs, which will be an interesting project, and I'm developing a level/room editor with a Preview function so I can cover most of my testing there (it won't do any good to have walls with holes!)