Especially useful when a developers don't know the final deadline (i guess for the most of indie games). The idea is to spend pretty equal time (and maybe money) for some few main directions of development during all development process.

Example:
1. programming (50%)
1.1 gameplay engine (17%)
1.2 stuffs (new instances of monsters, items, gameplay scripting...) (17%)
1.3 graphics engine (17%)
2. design (50%)
2.1 actable objects (17%)
2.2 static objects (17%)
2.3 level design (17%)

Because if for example to change a balance to programming(75%) and design (25%) programming becomes only 1.5 "better" but design becomes 2 times "weaker".

honestly? i think it's more like 20% programming ,and 80% fixing bugs,changing stuff according to feedback,designing stages...

Quote: Original post by MseMseM
Planning time to work
Especially useful when a developers don't know the final deadline (i guess for the most of indie games). The idea is to spend pretty equal time (and maybe money) for some few main directions of development during all development process.

This doesn't belong in Game Design. Moving to the Lounge.

Game A : really simple game mechanics, but a ton of hand-drawn animation.
Game B : geometric shapes and no animation, but really complex destruction code.

Time allocations for different departments will be different for each game.

I think that you have to discuss this issue in your team, because, a game can be written in less time planned or in twice the time planned.
The factor is quality.
You can decide that you want to focus on getting results to see the game design live, or you decide to have stable code, but do not see that much in live in early stages.

It really depends on what you are programming.

well for some games for sure
if 95% of resources (time/money) goes to programming and 5% to design (even for Tetris) i bet that for 99.9% of games it would be definetely better to change this proportion into at least 80%/20%
Shinobi cool nick! I remember Shinobi III on Sega Mega Drive!