Design and Development

Design and Development

In order to develop Star Dancer I had to design the game on paper first.  I am the sort of person who writes things down rather than simply jumps in and gets started.  Planning, preparation is very important.

So at the beginning of the year I put together a design on paper.  

Many sheets of paper.

Much of the design changed over time but the core idea remained the same throughout and much of the interface and back end is still very strongly based on the ideas that came out of this design process.  

Also - the budget was included in these documents. I sat down and worked out how much I believed it would cost me. I was fairly off in some cases but all in all I've kept close to the budget I indicated at the beginning of the year.  Whether I've gone over or not depends on whether I include a handful of costs that were 'bad expenses' or items that weren't used in the end (such as a library of classical music that I bought a licence for).  

Here are some sample documents in the design.  I have approximately 200 pages of notes that went into the making of this game.