Decreasing the failure rate of your games

[Marked 197]

I'm currently studying for my last ever difficult exam (technically second last, but my last ever is something I'm already expert in). As always during exams, my brain is firing off all these ideas that I don't have time to go through with because I should be studying. Anyway, after my next week I will officially have a qualification relating to software design/management/planning. Basically the non-coding side of software. And I now realize that I haven't really utilized here at GDU. 

 

So I am thinking about writing a series of game development process tutorials. The most important of which is the planning stage. Not your storyline, but planning for development. But it will relate to all the other stages as well. Gamedev is just like developing software: you plan, you design, you build, you test, and launch and then you probably iterate through a few of those all over again because your planning wasn't good. The series would also cover a range of types of maintained documents that are commonly used in software development, and these will be provided in the form of templates which are suitable for game dev. There will also be stuff on team management and project manager for head devs to manage troops. 

 

RM games and other low-level indie games have a huge failure rate, and part of that is natural to the program and the people who use it. I have never actually seen anyone here plan a game properly (not that that's generally made public), but I have seen time after time people have problems because of a failure of planning, process and technique. 

 

The ultimate goal is merely to play the percentages and decrease the # of project failures. 

 

Thoughts? Would you want to see this? Is there anything in particular you'd like to be covered? 

[dolarmak 23]

I think this could be helpful for some people, it's true that most people don't put enough planing when developing their games. But it's also pretty time consuming and most people on solo projects don't have the time plan everything they want to do, some of it will ultimately be spontaneous when building their maps/eventing. 

 

Personally I plan a few things, make basic maps and decide what will happen where and have a rough idea of dialog, but often while making parts I will add in a lot of things that seem to fit spontaneously while i'm making a map. I do try to decide what systems (battle, message etc.) and abilities characters will have before hand, but i'll switch up if it feels good or if something isn't working how i hoped.