You gotta plan...yo.

[Mariotroid]

I can' stress the importance of planning when it comes to making games. All of you younglngs planing to make a game, you should really plan stuff out.

If it wasn' for my game design document for Super Mario holidays, I'd be lost. Keep up good design and your paper. You can work on your paper as you make your game, but i can' stress out the fact that you need to plan a bit so you can make what you'e planned.

Gold luck!!

[Pedigree]

It's really a balance though. Start simple and expand later.

I've seen people plan ridiculously ambitious stuff in a document that is probably beyond their skill level.

 

[Mariotroid]

Yeah of course. That' why it' best to keep working on the document as you make your game. Plan a bit then develop. Plan more then develop more.

[Syaxamaphone]

Why plan when you can just make everything up as you go along and hope for the best??

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[YoshisIsland3]

Why plan when you can just make everything up as you go along and hope for the best??

For one side of the argument, you could plan so that whatever comes along next, won't be a total wreck, when you make it. (Level, event, etc.)

For another, you could just make everything as you go along, but it won't be as smoothly as planning out what you want for the best.

It all depends on the person and how they develop it.

[VinnyVideo]

"Make everything up as you go along" can actually be a successful strategy for simple minigames. But you'll want to develop a coherent plan when you're making anything nontrivial - especially when you're working with other people.

Course clear! You got a card.

[CGWorks]

I'd like to add that making mockups and also making additional plans as to how things such as UI and special effects will/should look will also help a lot. If you set out coding let's say a complex pause system that has multiple submenus, it'd be wise to have an idea as to how that menu and its submenus will look before you start work on it, otherwise you might end up with a mess and scrap it all and start over, wasting a bunch of time.

Either open a separate project file to create your mockups in or use paint to design them and brainstorm. If you have something you can work off of as a base it will take you a long way much quicker than winging it or merely thinking up the idea but never putting it into a form that you can visualize physically.

[Langton]

I wrote a lot of the ideas I had for the first Dimensions on paper well in advance before I actually implemented them. I jotted down ideas for each level theme, level-specific gimmicks, powerups, and each bosses' attacks, which ended up being quite different to their final versions, admittedly due to me forgetting about some of the ideas I had came up with. After recently re-discovering these design plans I made 4 years ago, there's actually some scrapped stuff I want to use in the sequel. Speaking of which, I actually did some character designing for the sequel before I finished the original.

Nowadays, I usually write in the Notes app on my phone, or in Notepad on my laptop as soon as I come up with an idea.

[Mariotroid]

I like all the replies here. All you guys put in good points. I especially like the idea of jotting down level ideas. I learned it' best to give a word to a level then build around that.



^^This has been my method the past year. Write down... a lot.

[Mario]

Plan to plan, sounds like a good plan.

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Interested in web development? Check out Super Mario Web Development. Wahoo!

 

""We choose to go to the [Suggestions board] not because it's easy, but because it's hard; because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win."
- John F. Kennedy"
- gothgirlgangblastermaster

[Evil Yoshi Toes]

Planning can prevent a pickle later on. I'm not a developer, but I've learned the hard way that planning is an essential part to many tasks.

[KoBeWi]

Well, my whole plan for Mariovania was a single sheet of paper with map laid out and rough estimate on what item or boss is where and the progression route. I came up with every other detail just when developing it (I usually don't know how the room will look until I make it, a total improvisation), following the plan for room placement and some general idea I had in my head. The Distortion area didn't follow any written plan at all, I just randomly placed rooms as I roughly thought it would make sense. Some of castle stuff wasn't originally planned, but I added few rooms because thought it would be cool.

That being said, it is possible to create a very complex game with minimal planning (or no planning at all). But to prevent you from getting lost, you need proper tools that will do the world indexing for you. E.g. for Mariovania I had a search tool that could look up every single item box on the map when I needed to locate some item.