Game design approach

How do you approach designing a game?

Do you plan everything out ahead of the actual coding & artwork, etc.? Or do you make it up more or less as you go along? Somewhere between the two?

Do you make all the art & sound yourself, or do you scoure the net for bits and pieces of stuff you can use?

Just curious to see. With the planning I tend to have a rough idea of what I want, and be as flexible as I can if I see something isn't working. With the art and sound, I tend to make all my own art & models, but having no real experience with audio editing I tend to look for sound files on the net.

Anything else you can add?

Between the two, but closer to the latter. My designs constantly evolve. I work better this way, but I'm a firm believer that everyone should find the way of working that suits them.



I make what I can, buy what I can't make and contract out what I can't buy. I'm cheap. I keep costs low because I don't take risks.

I just bang my head on the keyboard for a really long time. It seems to work pretty good.

I've been programming so long and use more or less the same structure everytime, it's only when I change languages that I need to rejig my structure a little.

Because of that for me the game design aspect is more about the final details of gameplay design than it is about information flow, sometimes I make very extensive notes cataloguing all of the ideas and desired appearance of the final game.

I usually have a few different ideas going through my head at once, which often results in me spending a few hours here or there putting together a basic engine with no media before realising "no this isn't what I really want to make" or "doesn't seem like it would be fun to play" so I then cease working on that idea, place all my design docs that I wrote as I went into my "game dev folder" which has many many text files of unstarted/unfinished games in it.

However, when I have an idea that I am more attached to I often spend the first week or two writing in various scrap books, bits of paper or occasionally on my PC what I want the game to do and how it will play. If after this I am still enthused about the game I spend pretty much an entire weekend coding and either come out of the weekend determined to continue working on it with a fairly firm plan of how I will go about it....or I end up putting it too into the 'game dev folder' where it will gather dust for an eternity.