Guides and frameworks to assist in start to finish development

Hi geeks

I have made a few games, none of them great, and usually it's an organic process of muddling along and experiencing tides of momentum and enthusiasm along the way.

I have a couple of bigger projects I would like to crack into in the next year or so, and they will require more planning and better management if I am ever to knock them off.


Does anyone have any online recommendations for planning and developing mildly complex games start to finish? I would be keen on tightening up my development practices as well as actually reaching my goals.

There's obvious stuff like list your assets/animations etc but if there was a framework I could latch on to it might be really helpful.

Thanks. Happy dev
~Aaron

 

Are you aware of "agile" software development? I find that to be pretty useful in helping my day-to-day work to be productive. There are loads of online tools which you can use for an agile/kanban board, with Trello being a common and solid starting point. Some of them integrate with version control systems, so that commits/pushes/submissions can automatically update the status of cards.

One thing that Agile isn't very good at on its own is long term vision and overall progress tracking. For this, having a design doc, spec, or something along those lines written up and reviewing progress against it periodically is useful. This can be formalised into milestones, which I recommend doing for any project longer than a couple of months.

One thing I don't recommend doing is making long-term plans with fine grained detail. In my mind software (including games) should be designed iteratively, which means that you don't know all of the details up front and thus can't account for them. This is fine. Decide how much time you're willing to invest into the project, and then in your agile / milestone meetings decide on how best to spend that time based on the most up to date knowledge at the time.

 

Great post, thanks

 

I am with angry penguin on the agile thing.

I would say. Don't make a big plan at all. Just a general idea of what you want one or two pages max.
Then.....Make a hard time budget, that you absolutely refuse to break

Lets say that time is 40 weeks.
divide that budget into 10 segments

Build the game completely end to end in the first 4 week segment.
it can be sloppy, missing sound animations art etc. But just get it all in and working.
Congrats - Your game is complete and you only used 10% of the time, but the game will probably really suck.
Test it figure out why it sucks
.... Now you know exactly what must be done to make it better!
DO NOT ADD FEATURES, DO NOT ADD FEATURES, DO NOT ADD FEATURES
Polish the broken bad implementation that is already there. and make it better in the next segment
do this cycle 10x. That is Agile.

You will have a nice product that you are ready to ship on time at the end of the 10th cycle.

P.S. you probably will ignore my advice about "Do Not Add Features", we all seem to do it. But that is the most important part. 10 iterative improvements of a small feature set makes a good quality product. Most of us fall into the trap that if we just add things it will be better. Agile is about keeping scope small, iterate, iterate, and iterate.