Milestone 2 – My planning process

Asteroids Plus 2.0 » Devlog

2023-01-06 by Mookie (@jyoung424242)

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So, this entry will address my approach to planning. Keep in mind, I’ve already planned this game once, coded and tested, and already have a deployment for this game. So, I didn’t have to grind and iterate that much on the structure, systems… components…

I take some time to try and state what I’m attempting to accomplish with this game. Since I’m not necessarily making something to sell, there usually is some academic reasoning.

That should be a decent start… now you’ll see eventually that some of that is not adhered to strictly, but in the moment, it provides me enough guiding principles to stick to.

I like to start drawing up mock “wireframes” of the game to at this point.

This doesn’t have to be perfect, but it gives me ideas on how things should go. Also, any state machines that I intend to use will be outlined here as well.

Then I start highlighting important systems and mechanics that I feel are important to identify at this point. The purpose of this is twofold. First, it forces me to think about my game from the block diagram approach, which sometimes I draw. But finally, these list of systems and mechanics sets me up to think about the sequence in which I develop the game.

Examples of this include progressive difficulty, end of game conditions, user input and control, physics and collisions, and combat…

The final thing I do once I feel that I’ve exhausted my own attention span on this, is to outline the sequence of operations that will allow for proper development. There are aspects of a complex system that need to be completed sequentially for this to make sense. Not sure if that applies to me here, but it could.