Topic: Your Game Design Workflow?

I think it is very important to have a very good and streamlined WORKFLOW for making a game. What is your workflow?

There are so many things to do if you are trying to develop by yourself, so having a good workflow will make things go smoother. My workflow might go something like this:

1)Come up with an IDEA. Want to tell a story? Want to test the math skills of someone? Want to make someone happy? Want to teach someone to draw? Well, write the story. Write down some math exercises. Think about what makes people happy. Make a lesson on how to draw.

2) Establish the MECHANICS of your game. What is the OBJECTIVE of the game? What OBSTACLES prevent completing the objective? What are the RULES? What REWARD do you get for completing the objective?

3) Now comes the technical stuff. You have to create the ASSETS for your game. If you are telling a story, you have to create the locations the story takes place in, as well as the characters in the story. If you are making a math game, you have to get those numbers to display on the screen. If you want to teach someone to draw, you have to draw the steps you want them to follow.

4) Now you have to PROGRAM. To get these assets moving and functioning, you have to program them, using your MECHANICS as a guidline.

That's about it!

I define a video game as an INTERACTIVE VIDEO that has an OBJECTIVE, OBSTACLES, RULES, and REWARDS.

Re: Your Game Design Workflow?

Wasn't sure if you were asking a question or making a statement? But being this isn't in the tutorials section I will take this as a free for all to comment.

1. Create a screenplay | I will start by creating a "short" screenplay, creating the beginning and end of the game with
a dozen or so plots/scenes in between, I will do this to give me something to start with and I already have an ending so if
I become overwhelmed I can cut it short anytime.

2. Create Game Mechanics | Here I will define the game play, and rules. This part is fairly quick so I tend to just get it out of the way right away.

3. Create some Concept Art | Using Matte Painting and Camera Mapping, as seen in my (WIP) tutorial I will create some really nice
screenshots of the locations mentioned in my screenplay. This gives me a visual templet to work from.

4. Create Assets | Characters, Props, Cutouts, Skydoms, Architecture, Terrains,  .... this is probable the most time consume part of the Game Development process atleast for me. I can create about 100 - 200 assets a month "if" I really focus and just get it done.

5. Character Voices, Music and Sound Effects | Once I have the majority of my assets I will start to produce Character Voices, Music and Sound Effects. I Particularly like to do my own character voices and using an audio editing program like "Audacity" I am able to make adjustments to my character voice's to mask certain characteristics in my own voice that gives away the fact that those characters were done by the same person. For music, I sponsor Kevin MacLeod from http://incompetech.com/ he produces Royalty Free music under the CC licenses and has had his music featured in hundreds of different movies. 

6. Build Scenes and Levels

7. Game Gui, Menu and Cut Scenes

8. Programming | At this point depending on the type of game I am making, I will assemble or choose an appropriate game engine.


Most people never complete a game by them self's they will ether burnout, lose interest or run into a problem they cant solve even on small games, its best to join a community and contribute to a collection of everything above. Then assemble a custom game from those resources.

Re: Your Game Design Workflow?

Good post Zester. I hate running into problems on these small projects. They make me quit. hahaha. Good workflow. Taking notes.

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Re: Your Game Design Workflow?

The most important thing, as when developing non-game software, is making a prototype before anything else.
What's a prototype. It's a very very basic version of what you have in mind, but complete, working in all the basic gameplay aspects.
You may have crappy textures and temporary models, and you may miss a lot of features, and you have no sound, etc., but the most important things must be there. Only then you start working on the details.
This is to avoid e.g., exaggerated example, wanting to make a hack and slash game and loosing 3 months on a menu programming and characters modeling. That's nonsense. You have to have a working hack-and-slash mechanics before everything else and only then do the GUI part and start modeling or find an artist.

This imho it's the only important things because after you have a prototype it doesn't matter much if you do modeling before textures or before sounds, etc.

Re: Your Game Design Workflow?

Some people will create a prototype, but for me I will create a modular game templet(RTS, FPS, ...) that I will use for all future projects, any changes to code are normally bug fixes. Everything else will come via reusable scripts.

So i can go right to my workflow as it stands, and in the end its just a matter of choosing a templet and what scripts i need.

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Re: Your Game Design Workflow?

1. The game idea. I usually start with a pretty clear idea of what i want to make, most of the time a clone of a game i liked (16-bit era games mostly)but that lacked features or has clear flaws in it's gameplay

2. Make some graphics for it (because i hate experimenting with primitives, i usually try to get something that reflect more or less what i have in mind

3. starting basic gameplay, usually full character movement and collision stuff

4. making character statistics, adding items, effects, ennemies.
Stuff such as collectibles, medpack, powerup, or spells and some ennemies with a braindead AI

5. start building a level that is close to what i want to get in the end (<- never succeed)

6. start to make some more mechanics, mostly interactions with the environement such as doors, elevators/platforms, teleporters.

7. start a basic GUI system

6. searching and applying sounds for all this

7. ... i never past point 7. To me it's always the same :

- At this point i usually have 15+ dofiles and lots of single variables that cross multiple files, so i get lost.
- blender inefficiency at level design + no objects/materials library system results in a giant mess for making levels
-  Game mechanics that works, and then who broke when you add or tweak something,
resulting in fixing the same stuff thousands of times, this is the main reason that makes me abandon a project.

Re: Your Game Design Workflow?

I agree 255 mechanics are very important. There was a similar post about this on gamedev.net. I put mechanics at # 2  after concept/idea.

Good point about re-usable scripts Zester. That is why I made the customizable game script. All I have to do to get things working is to drop that in the scripts folder, change one variable and WAM! Only time I have to script again is if I want a new feature, but I script it in a way that I can use it again.

One thing I see is that we have the same tasks. My original reason for trying Maratis is to test my idea on a Game that makes games. That makes making things Like the GUI or the ASSETS really easy. Even the programming.

It's more of a GDK (Game development kit). It can be adapted to any programming language or any 3d modeling package. I have the idea down, but the skill is sorta over my head.

Vegas, I just used dofile for the first time a few days ago. It really makes the code neater (I think I was past 300 lines of code).

I GOT AN IDEA!!!

Why don't we make a collection of LIBRARIES for maratis!! Of course, it would be nice to have them use object oriented programming. Once I convert my customizable game script to OOP I will post it as a library.