How much time do you spend in the design phase?
by Eric Lamendola · in General Discussion · 11/03/2004 (6:44 am) · 21 replies
Hey,
I was reading this article (http://www.gamasutra.com/features/20041101/rouse_01.shtml) and was wondering how much time other people spend in the design phase. Obviously the size of the project will determine how long is spent designing it. But keeping it strictly to percentages or other easy to shift metrics - what do you think is an adequate time spent in the design phase?
For that matter - what phases do you believe still exist (not including Marketing/Legal/Distribution)?
Design Phase? (Documents and workshopping ideas)
Pre-Development Phase? (Gather tools, people, resources and pseudo code)
Development? (Coding, art design, first playable components, etc.)
Testing / Debugging? (Beta, RC through GM)
From what I have seen - a decent breakdown is -- 30/20/25/25
It allows you to spend at least 50% of your time developing the ideas and fleshing out all of the game design flaws and prevents feature creeping.
Just wondering how other people felt on this.
I was reading this article (http://www.gamasutra.com/features/20041101/rouse_01.shtml) and was wondering how much time other people spend in the design phase. Obviously the size of the project will determine how long is spent designing it. But keeping it strictly to percentages or other easy to shift metrics - what do you think is an adequate time spent in the design phase?
For that matter - what phases do you believe still exist (not including Marketing/Legal/Distribution)?
Design Phase? (Documents and workshopping ideas)
Pre-Development Phase? (Gather tools, people, resources and pseudo code)
Development? (Coding, art design, first playable components, etc.)
Testing / Debugging? (Beta, RC through GM)
From what I have seen - a decent breakdown is -- 30/20/25/25
It allows you to spend at least 50% of your time developing the ideas and fleshing out all of the game design flaws and prevents feature creeping.
Just wondering how other people felt on this.
About the author
Mare Kuntz
If you (or anyone) is interested in taking a look at what we've come up with so far, feel free, it's a collaborative design project open to any gamedev member. Our design doc and stuff are here:
members.gamedev.net/avatargod/gamewriting/game.htm
And the design discussion thread, currently 626 posts long (!) and in the middle of a heated argument about the cultures of our three races, is here:
www.gamedev.net/community/forums/topic.asp?topic_id=267474
(I'm sunandshadow there.)