Properly planning a game and its structure

XNobodyX · 2014-01-10T22:12:21

Preamble: I have attempted to make 2 little indie games and each of them have failed for one reason, planning. For both of the projects I started off only planning to have a few parts to the game. As I started to code those parts I would realized that each of these parts needed a lot more code and classes and such than I originally thought. The problem is I would have already coded the majority of the game before I realized this. Thus leaving me with two options, 1) Rewriting the whole game, and throwing out countless hours of time. 2) Giving up . After thinking about where I went wrong it would always come down to the fact that when I started writing the game I didn't fully understand what I needed and thus didn't design it properly. I figure that this might happen a lot in many games(Realizing that a major change needs to be done) and I imagine that they don't all restart or quit. Which leads me to the conclusion that my planning might not be sufficient but the main structure of my code might be the problem. When I looked over my first game I found that a lot of my code was very specific and could not be easily rewritten without affecting other parts. The question: 1) How do you go about properly planning a game and allowing major changes to be made without a re-write? 2)To avoid problems with having to rewrite everything should I try and write everything as a module that can be used in a main game loop? If anyone has any good ways of organizing a game that you could point me to that would be awesome(Currently I am using the Model, View, Screen system)

For Beginners

Started by XNobodyX January 07, 2014 12:55 AM

19 comments, last by Eck 11 years, 1 month ago

Eck

7,700

January 10, 2014 10:12 PM

"Practice" is definitely solid advice. As you do it more and more, you'll start realizing flaws in your design earlier and earlier. You might start out with some simpler games like pong or a tetris clone.

If the code is too hard to manage, spend some time thinking about why that is. If you had it to do over again, what would you do differently? Do you think you could salvage that with some refactoring or is it too far gone?

Spend some time reading about software design techniques or good programming principles. Yeah it's boring, but they have some solid ideas.

Spend some time thinking about the proper name of a variable/class/function before you start using it.

And I recently replied to a thread that meandered through how I go about refining a design. You might find it useful?

http://www.gamedev.net/topic/652095-help-on-how-to-implement-stories-and-quests-on-an-rpg/#entry5122714

Anyway, I don't think there's some big picture you're missing. Keep at it.

- Eck

EckTech Games - Games and Unity Assets I'm working on
Still Flying - My GameDev journal
The Shilwulf Dynasty - Campaign notes for my Rogue Trader RPG

Properly planning a game and its structure

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