I'm here looking for your wisdom, or wise ones! I'm about to create a game which I believe will be popular amongst the others. It's not going to be MMORPGFPSRTS or anything similar. It will be a plain puzzle game similar to the Bejeweled or Jewel Quest. I have an idea for that game which is yet to take a fully fledged form of a Game Design document. What I'm asking for, is there any resources on the web that can guide me through the most complete process of creating, publishing and presenting that kind of game in a professional manner and good, well-established techniques? Please help me, o'wise ones, thy person prays for your eternal wisdom and knowledge. Thanks.

As far as I know there isn't a total solution document. Which is why i'm working on this: Shameless plug

Gamasutra and GDev both have masses of individual articles.. I'm just going to check those when I find something I'm unsure about.

OK, cool. I'll be reading it as soon as it comes out.
I knew that there are lots of articles on Gamasutra and GameDev about that and this, but there's no complete article about all sides of what' I've asked for.

Thanks anyway.

Well, in my oppinion Games are no different from ordinary software so you can and should use a proven software development process. There are a plethora out there but the main trend has been towards agile iterative processes moving away from the waterfall type process where you first create the massive requirements/game design doc, then go into analysis/design, implementation, test and finally delivery.

The main requirement for a game is to be fun/entertaining and this is something that you can not know by writing a full/detailed design doc. You should create the simplest version of your idea asap and test it. Is it still fun? Create the next version going through requirements, analysis, design, implementation, test, delivery for each version. Then you do this until you/your testers/your publisher are/is satisfied...

I'm currently involved in the development of a game using that approach. We release a new demo version every two weeks on our site. This works really well. We'll add the latest version (called iteration) tomorrow monday :)

I think that a puzzler is a really good idea btw!

Regards and good luck!
/h0bbE

Have you had a look around Dan's site? Obscure

Quote: Original post by evelyn
Have you had a look around Dan's site? Obscure

Actually if you are looking to go the shareware/self publish route I recommend joining the ASP http://www.asp-shareware.org/. Lots of people with a lot of experience developing and self publishing games and other apps.

Cool, thanks everybody for such detailed comments, they were really helpful.