Two questions for anyone who has done any amount of game programming, few months or a few years I'll take all responses. Lately I've become interested in starting up programming in my free time again, I have lots of big ideas but I feel like I need to take baby steps as I have never gotten my programs very far...

But anyways, what do people think is a good starting place for an idea and for a program?

I was thinking about the idea side of things, I feel like games these days go straight from someones noggin' into design and then development for their massive game. But shouldn't ideas be explored even further first? I'm wondering if anyone thinks its worth taking a PC Game idea, and making it a PnP RPG, CCG, or board game first. Find all those gotchas and loop-holes in your rules before you are hundreds of thousands lines of code deep. I would think this also makes you document your ideas in an orderly fashion (which I know a lot of developers dislike). What do you think?

And the second part of my question. Since I haven't been able to finish many of my projects (read any) should I be starting even simpler than I want for the end product? For instance if you want to make a text-based RPG, should you start with a simpler text-based choose your own adventure type game (much less complexity and player choice). Really, do programmers have simpler, smaller projects that lend well to their bigger projects allowing them to move quicker in the big project which otherwise would've taken much longer and perhaps lost steam?

**edit** Hate mmorpg.com's line spacing, made it a little easier to read. 

Also tl;dr:

1. Is it worth your time to do non-coded versions of your game idea first?

2. Is it worth your time to do smaller, simpler sub-portions of your game idea first?

Originally posted by Meltdown

Two questions for anyone who has done any amount of game programming, few months or a few years I'll take all responses. Lately I've become interested in starting up programming in my free time again, I have lots of big ideas but I feel like I need to take baby steps as I have never gotten my programs very far...

 

But anyways, what do people think is a good starting place for an idea and for a program?

 

I was thinking about the idea side of things, I feel like games these days go straight from someones noggin' into design and then development for their massive game. But shouldn't ideas be explored even further first? I'm wondering if anyone thinks its worth taking a PC Game idea, and making it a PnP RPG, CCG, or board game first. Find all those gotchas and loop-holes in your rules before you are hundreds of thousands lines of code deep. I would think this also makes you document your ideas in an orderly fashion (which I know a lot of developers dislike). What do you think?

 

And the second part of my question. Since I haven't been able to finish many of my projects (read any) should I be starting even simpler than I want for the end product? For instance if you want to make a text-based RPG, should you start with a simpler text-based choose your own adventure type game (much less complexity and player choice). Really, do programmers have simpler, smaller projects that lend well to their bigger projects allowing them to move quicker in the big project which otherwise would've taken much longer and perhaps lost steam?

 

**edit** Hate mmorpg.com's line spacing, made it a little easier to read. 

Also tl;dr:

1. Is it worth your time to do non-coded versions of your game idea first?

2. Is it worth your time to do smaller, simpler sub-portions of your game idea first?

My personal opinion on #2 is to work on what you feel will make it unique and make sure that works. Doing things out, #1, beforehand can help for sure, but an entire game on paper wouldn't neccessarily be absolutely important.

It sucks to have ideas and no means to make them a reality. I have given up on being able to share my ideas with players because my mind is incapable of translating my artistic views into visual representations nor am I able to stick to learning programming. I know how it works. I could do it, but I can't do it consistently enough to be able to learn it well enough to accomplish anything.

Start basic and then work towards your goal, don't start at the end.

1) I don't know about actually creating a non-coded version of your game, but creating a complete game design, so that you could create an offline version of your game (say...a pen and paper version) as well as any other version of your game is a good idea.

2) As far as starting small, if you have no programming experience, then starting small is your only option. You need to get a good grounding in some programming language(s) to get started. There is a LOT of development that goes into doing a game and even more that goes into an MMORPG, so building proof of concept parts of the game probably isn't a bad idea.

I've been writing Windows and Linux based software since 1995. Business software, not games. Having periodically dipped into writing games and what goes into it, I think I'm missing at least 6 months of focused training/knowledge before I could really get starting writing games in general, much less something like an MMORPG. That hasn't stopped me from designing a few games though. :-)

I've spent a good portion of my life as an old-school systems analyst.  I'm going to have to say 'yes' to your questions.

Modelling is an excellent way of exploring an idea without investing money into the much more expensive development processes.  When used properly, a good model can anticipate problems, especially queueing problems that are immediately obvious.  It can also give some ideas of the difficulties that development will encounter, control mechanisms that will be needed, etc.  I'd strongly suggest some form of modelling, either informal or structured, analog or with a digital modelling scheme (like UML).

As for starting, I think it can work to have a planned mechanism for expanding the framework in place (another model) before you start implementing (coding, creating resources, etc.).  Identifying a way to expand your idea without having to re-work older elements is critical.   Some re-work is inevietable, but good documentation can help identify the impact of change elements.  (And I can't tell you how many times I wished people who had even simple documentation for some of the Y2K projects I had to deal with).

I'd strongly recommend that you look at some UML modelling.  Specifically, I think a couple of Use cases, Activity DIagrams, Sequence Diagrams and a Collaboration Diagram can give you a good start.   Most UML books are going to focus on Classes and Objects, and you will need / want those when you start to implement things.  But these other diagrams can give you an accurate model of how things will need to work.  A book, a pencil and some paper will work, or you could look for some professional UML development tools.  Most will generate code based on your models these days.

And remember, a model doesn't need to be all inclusive.  It is an abstraction of something else.   A model is never intended to be the object, even if a tool will spit code out its nether end.   It's okay if the edges are a bit fuzzy.  You might even consider making a prototype with something like Access or even Excel.  In a way, it is much better to do that if you're trying to capture requirements, as no overly-anxious user (in this case, gamer) would ever think that this code is what they're getting.

Edit:  Forgot to mention, Good luck with your project!

Don't write your ideas down before you make them until you hit a point where you understand object oriented programming so well that you don't feel you can make any further progress.

Until then, focus on making small games that you can complete in their entirety in one sitting/one night.  Hit 'done points' where you are 'done' with that script and could shelf it forever if you feel like it.  Then if you wish, expand on it.  Try to learn something new each time you do this, and try to write your code cleaner, more efficiently, and in a more advanced manner.  You will want to do bigger and better projects, but try to build up to this.  Until you start object oriented programming you really should not be making anything that takes longer than a day to make.