Designing is one of the more accessible areas of game development. Everyone has their own ideas for would-be features that they’d like to see in a game. Almost everyone has at least one ‘hit idea’ stored away that if implemented would see a mainstream game’s sales increase by the millions. It is also one of the hardest areas of game development to master, since it requires you to not only design a game, but also design documents for a game which five programmers could take and come up with similar results from.
To give you an idea of how difficult this can get, the university at which I’m studying a degree in Computer Games Programming also has a course in Computer Games Design. Together they have drop out rates which are some of the highest in the university, simply due to their inherent difficulty (and of course the pathway leaders’ insane desires that their courses be up to an incredibly hard, and therefore more prestigous, standard).
What does it consist of? Anything you could possibly imagine needs to be written down happens here. Everything has to be planned for at this stage. What kind of information will the player enter? How will that be processed by the database? What structure will the database have? To what extent must the database be normalised? What is the most efficient method of doing x, y or z? What development environments will be used? What end-user environments will be used? These are a smattering of the questions that must be answered.
Normally with a QRGame, I take a very flexible approach. I write a basic design structure which will get the game into the beta stage, then I start to flesh it out with features. However, this has proven unsuitable due to the success of IPTwo. Using this strategy only serves to make the games appear inferior to IPTwo, reducing attention to the game and therefore seeing it sidelined before my original visions can come to fruition. Therefore in Grand Prix Tycoon I decided a strong design is crucial.
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