Personal Project Planning

Question

I want to design a 2D game idea with C#/XNA. Between school, project inexperience, limited resources, and other things that may cause me to bail on the project I am going to try to plan it out before I jump in:

• What are some key aspects you've noticed in a successful personal project?

• How did you (successfully) draw revenue the project (besides asking for donations)? (Note: this is not the main purpose of my project but would be nice!)

• How do you plan non-programming aspects like window layouts (UI), flow of game, and look and feel?

• How do you bring an abstract idea of a game and making into a real product. What tools do you use in your sketching and planning?

• With limited resources (artistic talent and money), how do I create some of the art resources I need (besides stock art)? Or should I not worry about that until I have a finished product?

• Finally, how do you break barriers in your code (may it be knowledge, time, or perseverance)?

Answer 1

1. If you want somebody else to use this game, make it non personal. Get somebody else who you can give demos to and get feedback from. Make the game very very simple. Build that first before moving onto something very simple. Then go for simple!

2. not sure :)

3. Plan with pen and paper sketches for window layouts and game flow. For look and feel, browse the web for slick looking sites you can take inspiration from.

4. Use notepad, and write the shortest list of things that need doing to make the simplest working demo. Only work on the things you wrote down otherwise you can get carried away on some detail and end up not producing anything useful.

5. Art is an important part of a game, and you can't have a finished product without it. How about searching the web for a collaborator who'd be interested in doing it for you.

6. If your stuck with something in your code, ask for help on StackOverflow! :)

Answer 2

Some great thoughts given in these articles:

• http://www.flatredball.com/frb/docs/index.php?title=Tips_for_Completing_an_Independent_Project
• http://makeitbigingames.com/2006/06/five-realistic-steps-to-starting-a-game-development-company/
• http://makeitbigingames.com/2006/02/five-foundational-steps-to-surviving-as-a-game-developer/

Answer 3

What are some key aspects you've noticed in a successful personal project?

1. Don't worry about how it will turn out
2. Do it for fun
3. Don't plan it
4. Start small, don't think big
5. Actually code instead of procrastinating on so or other similar sites

Answer 4

Key aspects: Primarily, something that you are excited about. Make a game that REALLY gets you going, and you'll be motivated by your desire to share the finished product with others -- your end product's quality will probably be improved by your passion, as well.

Profitability: Well, since this is XNA and all, if you release a version on Xbox Live, you will earn 70% of the sales revenue that your game earns. Games can be priced for 200, 400, or 800 points (roughly $2.50-$10).

UI/Usability: For this, I typically go through a lot of playability testing...booting it up, seeing how things "feel," then tweaking things if they just don't feel right. I came across a lot of things that I never really thought about before (fade-ins/fade-outs for menus, repeat rates for keys, and so forth), and play-testing is one of the more effective ways that I've been able to identify issues like that. If you've got friends, you can ask them to give you feedback as well.

Planning Tools: Truthfully, I just make a list of the things that I want to include in the overall game concept, then slowly get more granular as I iron out more and more of the fine details. Certain ideas inevitably change after playtesting may reveal them to not be as fun as you had imagined they would be, of course. I haven't ever seen a huge need for any formal tools for this process, though, but I will give the disclaimer that all of my projects have been fairly small in scope and have not been professional-sized undertakings or anything.

Art: This may not always be an option for you, but I have a few friends online that are gifted with art skills -- I solicited interest, and got some volunteers. I presented the option to earn a cut of whatever royalties may come in, but most of them were happy with an attribution in the credits and a chance to see their work in a game that's playable by people all over the world. Regarding small things (icons, etc), stock/royalty-free art can do the job in certain cases, too, but I wouldn't recommend relying on it.

Breaking Barriers: Not sure what's quite meant by this question, but generally speaking if I've come up against some sort of unforeseen issue (technical/implementation challenge, gameplay-related, or what-have-you), I'm able to either solve the problem or come up with a suitable work-around if I put my mind to it for long enough. Did you mean something else by this?

Answer 5

What are some key aspects you've noticed in a successful personal project? Focus on something that actually works.

How did you (successfully) draw revenue the project (besides asking for donations)? Not directly. However, skills get you a job. Build skills.

How do you plan non-programming aspects like window layouts (UI), flow of game, and look and feel?

1. Build the inside -- the core data model first. If the data model works, everything else is far simpler.

2. Build unit tests for the model to be absolutely sure it always works.

3. Work out "flow" and other control issues based on that model.

4. Build the GUI later, once you have a solid foundation.

How do you bring an abstract idea of a game and making into a real product? What tools do you use in your sketching and planning?

I do the following.

1. I use Argo UML for technical UML diagrams.

2. I write documents with my end-state in mind. What the API will be like. How it will work. As part of writing the documents, I clarify my thinking.

3. I write code in pieces, with unit tests, and refactor ruthlessly.

With limited resources (artistic talent and money), how do I create some of the art resources I need (besides stock art)? Or should I not worry about that until I have a finished product?

Find an artist who wants to help.

Finally, how do you break barriers in your code (may it be knowledge, time, or perseverance)?

1. Build the inside -- the core data model first.

2. Spike elements of the technology separately from the main development. Build separate proofs of concept for each new technology. Do not try to integrate unknown technology into the final product. (Many of my customers try this and it doesn't work.)

Answer 6

Having had an experience with game development in my teenage years what I can suggest is the following:

• Make sure you have the story ready, or at least the basic points before you start implementing. Also make sure that you do not change the genre of the game while in dev stage. (yeah, I know, this is stupid, but could happen ;-) )

• We actually drew some revenue when we managed to sell the game to a software house, however because we had already spent too much in the dev process, we just broke even (i.e. to little profit). So be careful what you spend beforehand

• From what you said, you're still in school, so take advantage of that. There will surely be folk out there with artistic talent, most probably friends of yours. Make a team. That's what we did and it was all the way back in 1993! At that time it was even harder. We introduced our talented friends to 3D-Studio (v3 back then) and some even to computers in general, and believe me, before you knew it they were making brilliant art out of it!

• Use pen and paper to create the story boards (even better with the friends mentioned above. Decide on the development approach. I.e. what libraries will you use etc. Read a lot about game dev. Make a plan of the project. Give it your best ;-)

• Unlike us back then, you have the web to help you. For whatever problems you have with your code it is easy to look it up. StackOverflow didn't exist back then!

And of course make sure you have fun in the process otherwise it will eat you alive!

Answer 7

What are some key aspects you've noticed in a successful personal project?

Just do it!

Answer 8

First of all - I know universities don't tend to teach this but you really must do it... get source control going. I would suggest installing TortoiseSvn from here: http://tortoisesvn.net/downloads

With TortoiseSvn (a subversion client) - you can create a repository on your USB Flash Drive and carry it around with you, so you always have a copy of your project files. More importantly you can have more confidence when you make changes - because it keeps a history of the changes you've made. So if you break something, you can revert to the most up to date version on your usb flash drive... or even an earlier version if you wish. It also provides ways of showing differences between file revisions, all from the explorer shell extension.

For a personal project the key thing is to keep motivated. You keep motivated by setting yourself attainable tasks. Aim for something attainable. Always make sure you can build your project. Concentrate on adding new functionality while keeping the old stuff still working rather than building up huge nicely designed framework that might end up going no where. If you write your code well, you can refactor and abstract later after you figured out what game it is you actually want to build.

I would advocate a todo list of some kind... something like the spreadsheet found here on Joels site: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000245.html

If you want to get fancy, I would suggest something like Trac: http://trac.edgewall.org/ Trac is a wiki, to-do / bug list and repository viewer all in one. If you get someone else working with you on a project, collaboration with source control and a shared wiki becomes more useful. It's also good to work with others... you can keep each other motivated.

The Wolf fire blog recently had some interesting design ideas and cited serval sources here: http://blog.wolfire.com/2009/02/design-principles-from-tufte/

As for getting money, others have already covered the community games thing.

Art assets - there are a few places to find these. Scout the forums at www.gamedev.net. Def look at this blog here for some excellent art (and game design ideas) http://lostgarden.com/

Others have suggested keeping tools simple - I would agree. The simplier and more accessible things are when it comes to project planning, prototyping and design - the more likely you are to use them. As long as you can communicate with yourself when you revisit something... or other people when collaborating, it's a good tool. Set yourself attainable goals, and get on with it :-)

Answer 9

What are some key aspects you've noticed in a successful personal project?

I suppose this largely depends on your definition of success. I consider a game project successful if:

• It's fun. Enough that I want to play it after I've finished.
• I learn something in the process of making it.
• I actually complete the project, where complete is defined as having art, audio, and any other assets adequate for the style of game that I'm making.
• It works under 'field conditions', rather than simply on my own machine/hardware configuration.

In my case, every project that I've considered successful has been one that I've done some serious planning on and committed to seeing through to completion. That's the biggest step for me to get past. A casual project that is the product of a bored weekend usually won't get finished.

How did you (successfully) draw revenue the project (besides asking for donations)? (Note: this is not the main purpose of my project but would be nice!)

Heh. Haven't managed this yet. But then, that hasn't been a concern of mine enough to do the work required to support it. Someone already mentioned the potential revenue from XBLA for XNA projects, which is a very easy avenue to success if your project is the sort of thing that translates well to the console. I've looked into it, but it isn't really appropriate for my projects so far.

How do you plan non-programming aspects like window layouts (UI), flow of game, and look and feel?

Pen. And paper. I draw a lot of screenshots as guides and I'll usually have some kind of artistic theme in mind to go along with the gameplay. Rapid prototypes help here too; everything from making mockups of menus and various screens in a drawing program to making some simple interactive stuff in a throwaway project.

Write everything down. I take lots of notes and I've been known to have a laptop with notepad open on it sitting next to my development machine, to save me the trouble of alt-tabbing away from my code to type a quick note on what I'm doing. Some great ideas come out of the process of trying to make other things work and if you don't write it down, it didn't happen.

How do you bring an abstract idea of a game and making into a real product. What tools do you use in your sketching and planning?

Work iteratively as much as possible. I hate to sound cliche, but the whole agile model works really well for games. Start with that core 'fun' idea you have that inspired you to make a game in the first place and get that working in code. Maybe it's a single mechanic that you want to build puzzles/levels around or maybe it's more of a look/feel that you can capture in a single environment/level/whatever. Either way, if you can get a single example of it working right, it becomes a good check on whether the idea is actually viable and will likely give you some ideas of the different ways it can be implemented. That might seem kind of vague, but more specific advice would depend on any number of other factors (your choice of genre, audience, the specific ideas you have in mind, etc.).

With limited resources (artistic talent and money), how do I create some of the art resources I need (besides stock art)? Or should I not worry about that until I have a finished product?

Peter Molyneux of Lionhead has said that he used to prototype all of his games with ascii art. If they were fun with that limited level of graphics, then they were worth continuing. While you might not be able to get that simple with some genres (and an ascii 3d shooter might be novel for it's own sake...), certainly worrying about finished art, audio, or other assets is something that can be saved for much later. In the end, if the game is fun to play, then getting an artist willing to work with you becomes a lot more trivial. I have, on many occasions, used copyrighted assets during my prototyping phase when I just couldn't stand to look at my own art any longer. Just be sure that you have anything like that replaced before you start distributing your project...

Finally, how do you break barriers in your code (may it be knowledge, time, or perseverance)?

Not sure exactly what you're thinking about here, but breaking barriers is what writing code is all about really. You're finding creative solutions to interesting problems. The web is a great resource for general knowledge, but in the end, it's your own time and perseverance that will create something interesting.

Best of luck.