Development Diary Week 4 -- Design doc finished

Well, I finished the (first version of the) design document. I was too far behind and wound up a day late, but oh well.

I decided to focus my design document better by concentrating on my target audience. My primary target is, well, me. Its main purpose is to keep me focused on where I'm going, what's most important, and how I'm going to get there. The secondary audience is a hypothetical one. If I suddenly had to pass the project off to another developer or team, the document should guide them well enough that they'd eventually produce a game that's generally similar (in gameplay and plot) to what I have in mind.

I've started keeping a record of hours worked by task. I think this will be useful for 1) auditing how long a task takes me compared to my estimate, to aid my planning; 2) seeing how much time I'm actually able to spend each week.

I'm not satisfied with the menu layout and operation that I've designed so far. Some of the screens (mainly the ability learning one) seem clunky and hard to use. I think I'm going to have to wait until the game engine is fully built so I can get a sense for what the player does most often and try to make that more convenient. Corollary: Don't spend a lot of time tweaking the menus!

I still have a lot of details to flesh out in the plot. I've got a pretty clear idea of the beginning and the endgame, but only a general outline for the whole middle of the game.

In general, I'm feeling alarmed at the prospect of how much content I have to come up with in every area. ("Have to" in the sense of reaching the minimum level of variety that I'll consider adequate.) Spells, special attacks ... and I've barely thought about run-of-the-mill enemies.

I think my next step is to step back a bit and do some planning. I'm going to draw up a "triage guide" for all of the features I want to include. I'll use it as a guide to try to work efficiently by doing the most important and/or fastest features first, preparing for the likelihood that I won't get to everything (sniff). Then I'm going to make a schedule: need to have X feature done by this date, after this milestone date, need to stop adding features and just add content. I'll have to follow a careful plan if I'm going to actually get this done, especially considering my late start.