What do you do before you start making a game?

I think everyone has a different approach towards making games.
I'm curious to hear about yours.

Do you just start right away drawing sprites and writing textboxes in the editor? While only having little clue what the story will be?

Or do you first make up the whole world, with all it's NPCs, items and enemys and story?

Do you make a detailed plan what kind of scripts you're going use?

How do you document your ideas?

I'd like to discuss diffrent way to work on "organizing" the game making process here.

I just take an idea and try to run with it. I have about a bajillion ideas that float through my head in the span of a day. I'm currently working on a new project (God forbid, ANOTHER one?!), which is currently under the name of MageQuest. It shall have a lot of magical crap in it. The story is shakey, but it will hopefully have some cool features, like:

* Choosing which school you would like to be in (Fire, Water, Air, Earth Elementalists or Summoning.)
* Gender choosing.
* Depending on your gender and school, it (might) be possible to have one of ten different partners. How I shall go about it shall be tough...creating 10 unique heroes...5 will be guys, and 5 would be girls.

Guys would be paired up with guys (Because your partner would be your roomate, and you can't have an opposite gender roomate.) and girls would be paired up with girls.

I generally start thinking of sprites and areas before the story. The story usually falls in place eventually.
MageQuest starts similar to Motrya, with the main hero and his friends near graduation. However, the difference is, you will be able to pick your secondary school.

I hope it turns into a game, because I have a bad habit of scrapping things because something new comes along.

Sounds very similar to my usual approach. I tend to get an idea, bring up a text document, and just write as thoughts hit me. After 5 to 10 minutes, I find that I've got a basic storyline with few or no story-killing issues. Then I set to work on everything for the beginning of the game, and progress from there.

Of course, I tend to give up on games pretty quickly, so...

@ Master K
I like you're idea of 'MageQuest' game. It sounds really interesting, rather than a school story, unlike the typical 'good agains evil for saving the world' thing. Will it be a rather funny or rather serious game?


On creating heros there was an interesting article in one of the hamsterspreak issues.
http://superwalrusland.com/ohr/issue11/hero.html


Yeah. I know quite well what you mean.

@ J_Talyor

Why do you do that? New ideas for the next game? Or something else?
What do you consider to be story-killimg issues?



As Kim and Jose is the first game i'm making i can only say what I do, and what i wont do again next time.

For 'Kim and Jose' the story - 2 teenages travelling a world where monsters live- was in my head for quite a long time before I discovered the OHR.
I drew little pictures of the protagonists and some monsters first.
Before starting making the game, i stared making a document where I write down my ideas, and also because I was new to the Editor, i also wrote down how to do things as well.
Until now the dokument has grown up to about 100 pages. Over time I stared documenting things more detailed enemys with their stats, formations, items, attacks, pictures of maps ect. in that document.
If the game is finished I want to remove the technical stuff and use the document as some kind of manual.
On top of the dokument I made a section where I write down (minor) things that still need to be changed/improoved. This is also helpfull if I take a break from working on the game, and then I come back months later I can see what i need to do.
Things I notice while testing the game.
The changes I did made I list up in an other section.

One problem while organizing things are the textboxes.
I do write the dialogues just after or while designing an area, and the areas are not really planed much in advance.
Sometime later someone tells me that there is information missing, than i have to add an extra textbox. So the textboxes are not really cronological.

That's baisically how I work on 'Kim and Jose'.

I decided that I don't want to do all this translation work in my next game, so i'll start writing dialoguesw in english from the beginning. I'm also thinking about writing the detaild story and most of the dialogues first.

Drink heavily

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My website, the home of Motrya:
http://www.jshgaming.com

This has always worked for me

...Can't it be both...?
Well, it will have humor, but it will be serious. It will have choices that might impact wheather you even get a partner.

The game will have several scripted features...the heroes are all going to be unique. I have plans for some heroes...there shall be two of each for each school. As in, say, a male and female for each school that would become partners. Currently, there are two vivid in my mind:

* Jiyva: She currently has all her spritework done. She looks amazing for my standards. She is going to be the Female Earth Elementalist partner.

* Muna: She will be the Female Summoning Partner. She is currently only in concept.

All of the heroes will have their own, special innate abilities along with their wizardry and their school powers. Summoning will be special, because when used outside battle, it shall hopefully summon a actual partner member that will vanish after a short while...

Sometimes I have a general idea of what I'm going to do in the game (at least for the first parts), sometimes I'll plan out the entire story ahead of time... usually more of a general idea at first but by the time I get the game to a playable start I'll already have most of it figured out at least in my head, if not written down somewhere.

Usually I'll get an idea for a game's story or characters or something that kind of starts off the whole thing, then start making some graphics (usually walkabouts, heroes, and enemies... maptiles and the rest always come later)... and while I'm not working on those I'll get ideas for the storyline stuff and start coming up with an outline of that. Or at least have "this needs to happen at some point" type stuff somewhere.

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FYS:AHS -- Swapping out some step-on NPCs for zones + each step script
Puckamon -- Not until the reserve party is expanded.[/size]

New ideas, getting far too busy for a little while, getting bored. There's a plethora of reasons. Story-killing issues are where somebody dies, but can't die; or some other incontinuity.

First thing I do is one of:

- Draw a basic NPC
- Stat the main hero
- Draw a couple of maptiles
- Import stuff from one of my other games
- Import music from my library that I think would sound cool in an RPG


So far, each game has come out fairly different depending on what way I do it as much as anything else. (Both versions of Wolf's Quest began with the NPC or maptiles; Maces Wild began with the hero's stats; Noodnik began with music; Weegee began with importing stuff.)

For me, textboxes are only slightly easier than leaving the editor to go draw some backdrops to tell the story with, which are only slightly easier than trying to use plotscripts.

This explains both the use of long tracts of text to convey my stories and the reason most of my games have plenty of dummied out stats for things, but very little story to deal with.

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Remeber: God made you special and he loves you very much. Bye!

Pour yourself a glass of your favorite beverage, yes.

A) Ignore everyone else making ohr games
B) Open your favorite word processor and outline
C) a) Prototype the look of your game
C) b) Prototype all features you'd like to see
C) c) Take the outline and turn it into a detailed blueprint

or

A) find someone who can draw
B) find someone who can draw
C) find someone who can draw

Edited for truth

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My website, the home of Motrya:
http://www.jshgaming.com

I have an idea, then I make the game.

It seems the more I plan things, the less likely the game is to actually being made.

We tend to plan out much of the game at least until a skeleton is in place. Then one of us draws the NPCs while the other puts in place holder graphics and starts replacing these with layers of more advanced graphics.
Scripting usually comes during this time and any movies we plan to use. Fighting scenes come in between that area as well as the quest and side quests figure into graphics or NPCs already created. Of course we are still planning the game even then and making changes.

Also important is that we complete one map at a time so a game can be tested from the get go on a map and we see clear progress and set goals (t helps us continue to see what we done).

Lastly we create a "to do" list and a thread here to keep us going when other issues and work causes us to make excuses not to go on. Also its easier to ask for help and get help when others here know a little of where you are coming from.

That's about it.

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The high and mighty confused queen of the thirteenth tile on the bathroom floor