Story Planning

So I'm going to be creating a new game and I've got several notes on how I pretty much want the game to go. But I'm wondering if I should start off with a fully fleshed story or just a kind of skeleton and flesh it out during the actual creation of the game?

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Either way works depending on what kind of writer you are, there's no right answer here. What's important though is being willing to cut a scene if it doesn't work, even if you've invested time in it. Some part of your story is guaranteed to change no matter how much pre-planning you do, so don't feel bad about killing off parts that just don't fit any more.

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Super Walrus Land: Mouth Words Edition

A perfect vision of what you want the final product to be would be ideal, and would mean you would never have to make changes or experiment. That's surely impossible for any non-trivial game. It's art, not science, and experimentation is part of the fun. But it can't hurt to plan things out beforehand. A better vision of the goal helps, surely? It can help you make changes to the plot and structure of the game sooner rather than later. Ultimately, use whatever method is most enjoyable.

I was talking about planning with SDHawk the other day and I claimed that you can make up details as you can go along, and he retorted (paraphrasing) that if the details matter to things like pacing and what the player is meant to do and whether there's even anything to do in an area rather than being a waste of time that should be cut, then you should have a plan for that. Also he showed off some games designed out on spreadsheets; I was impressed.

Is this a random collab game? Because I sure don't have anything at all planned for my game.