   How (if at all) are you planning?
  Hey all,Was curious, how much time are you spending on planning? I understand a lot of you are going solo so maybe planning isn't as essential, but I was quite impressed to see a fair few people able to jump straight in. Me and Rim have spent a lot of time so far just jabbering on about ideas, conisdering whether xyz will work, etc. We're keeping all our notes in a small DokuWiki (which is a very nice system!)After that, we're (well, I am, anyway) thinking about making user story cards, then moving onto the coding. Hopefully start coding some time next week, I'd imagine.What about you?   
  We spent three months brainstorming on Rumble Box before we ever wrote anything other than physics code.  On the other hand, I'm currently working on a project that I just jumped in and started writing a prototype, and I'm going to play with it to see what will make it the most fun.   ;  My team leader set up a development wiki. Whenever we have an idea, we stick it in there.   ;  I'm working alone, so I plan as I go.   ;  I plan some stuff in my head and usually write a few things down in Notepad, but since I generally work alone, I do all the code planning as I go.   ;  As past contests have proven, planning, communication, and camaraderie are essential.Don't kill me, pi, you need my art!We have a small team, and generally just send email around like crazy and type up word files. If I can get the hang of this Wiki stuff, we'll be set. Unfortunately, wiki has a bit of a learning curve.   ;  I made out some rough plans at the beginning, now i'm just coding away to meet the deadlines I set myself. I have a very rough idea of the story and gameplay i'm after and the rest will kind of fill out as I go on (I hope [lol]).The World Cup is starting to maybe take its tole and I think i've fallen ever so slightly behind. Will need to pick up the pace a little if I am going to have enough time to implement all the stuff I want before I get stuck into the game related things and the scary part (the artwork) [smile]   ;  Mmm...well we kind of planned.  We were already designing a game like this..and some of the code was already written...but I am the coder and since we are hoping to get this game kind of big...I am re-writting all the game right now using good clean code.  lol.  But..yeah we are designing and talking and that stuff.  Like actually...I was looking to complete one goal today...but I quickily realized I needed to design code a little more, to get that...so I actually went to word and typed up a code design doc, to keep my code ideas down on there.  Me and the artist are talking about this game all the time.  Chad.   ;  I write a todo-list and then I try to follow it.   ;  I won't start coding until about mid July, although that's because I'm away at the moment and don't have all my resources with me. Even then, the first month of coding was stuff I was planning on doing anyway and will be universal to a wide variety of games. I don't expect to really get into the game specific coding until August. I'd like to get a good idea of all the gameplay details planned first before jumping in.Of course, prototyping art and music is something I love to do early and often, so I'm doing that already.