Favorite thing when it comes to designing

[lhdrafter]

Character portraits probably are my favorite thing to do while designing games.




Whats your favorite part?

[NeoSpade]

I've personally always loved the formulating of the characters and world. My friend down in Cardiff (it's a Welsh City, in Wales :P) comes up here every so often and we can spend hours writing and mapping. It's kinda sad in one sense but you really get a feel for the characters and their relationships with each other and the world.

On the project I'm currently working on we've profiled 29 of the main characters and wrote up a decent amount of history. It's awesome having a novel's worth of detailed character notes, quite fulfilling as well.

After that I guess I love doing the graphics, and I'm very guilty of focusing on only one aspect at a time. (I prioritise textboxes last :S).

[NinjaOverdrive]

For me it's the initial stages of conception. That creative high from breathing life into a cast of new characters, building up a world, devising an intriguing plot. As with most projects I do I always start a new game designing project on paper and have everything written out first. The drawback to this, however, is that in the past after I get everything written out, start the designing process I usually get halfway through the game before I've exhausted the story and move on to a new story. I lack long term commitment which is why I don't have any completed games (from other engines) under my belt yet.

Secondly, even though my drawing abilities suck I have a strong DIY attitude and just enjoy putting a project together and seeing all the art and other content that I created in action.

[mjohnson092088]

i love designing maps. there's just something about creating a whole world that makes me feel a bit like god. i especially like designing dungeons, since they're usually a big part of any game.

[FnrrfYgmSchnish]

Depends on the game for me.

I really like making the maps for Okédoké, Puckamon and... another game I've been working on that I haven't actually told anyone about yet. But making the maps has been a real pain in the slime in Fnrrf Ygm Schnish: Alleghany Hell School, for some odd reason. I guess part of it's the fact that FYS:AHS is (until a certain point in the game, anyway) set entirely in a high school, so there's not a whole lot of variety in what the maps look like; the other games all have all sorts of different kinds of maps (deserts, snowy areas, forests, sewers, caves, etc.), but so far the only really different maps in FYS:AHS so far have been things like the gym and auditorium. I've notice that I get a lot more work done when I make some of those in between the more bland maps, rather than just trying to make a ton of regular classrooms or school hallways in a row.

Enemy graphics are one thing I always like making more of, mainly because I've finally gotten good at them and I can make some goofy-looking critters that actually come out looking pretty close to the way that I draw them on paper.

I guess I just like making graphics in general, though the enemy graphics are probably my favorites (and maptiles--unless I really feel like making maptiles at the moment--are usually my least-favorite.)

[msw188]

I also enjoy making a world. Characters are less fun to me than trying to give the world a history and mythology. I love making various NPCs talk about the world itself, especially when the information will be important for the player at a later time (for example, an NPC already in Tales 2 mentions a famous glass blower in a far southern town, who will be a very important character much further into the game (as in hours of gameplay beyond where I am in design at the moment). Things like this keep the world feeling real, and keep me excited about continuing to work on the game.

[Nathan Karr]

I like trying to design combat and magic systems, wherein individual spells remain distinct and useful when measured against each other, and where plain ol' attacking is useful for conserving energy.

For me, it's the design of spells, items, and characters' roles that is the fun part.

[Skullduggery Studios]

Storyline and graphics. Coming up with a storyline is *snapfast*, and I can do graphics pretty fast and well. It's the building of the maps and textboxes and whatnot that drags me down into.... not working on the game.

[msw188]

I also greatly enjoy trying to design actions and roles for characters in battle, but I think this is much more difficult and occasionally tedious to execute.

[RMZ]

I personally enjoy doing enemy sprites the most. Trying to make them look ferocious.

[Twinconclusive]

Designing Classes and their functions.
Making animations.
Spontaneously packing as much sludge into a game as possible and hoping that it can act as a standalone game before I burn out.

What I do most is probably fill in countless notebooks of doodles and notes for later use.

[NinjaOverdrive]

What I do most is probably fill in countless notebooks of doodles and notes for later use.

Heh. You ain't the only one.

[RMSephy]

Storylines and scripting. Making new battle systems is lots of fun, but making graphics is slow and tedious and makes me not want to work on my games ever.

[Willy Elektrix]

Maps. Specifically, mazes. I love them. I actually read a fair amount about maze design and maze theory as well and it's fun to put new ideas to use. Recently I've enjoyed making mazes with a "logic lance". That is, a maze that can be solved by a patten. For instance, always turning left, right, left, right, etc.

I also enjoy writing descriptive text boxes to build atmosphere.

[NayusDante]

Maps... I love making a BMP of the basic shape of my map where one pixel equals one tile. Different colors become different tiles. I'll import the image into Mappy with 1x1 tile size and export as a binary to import with the full size tileset. Then I draw the coast lines by hand. It's very zen.