Addendum 4: Initial design
How to Make a MMOLG
Logan: "I was talking to my buddies and saying that IF I ever had someone swoop down and say "We will fund the 'dream FAQ' then I'd spend 3 months to one year working with other people JUST on the design. Then, we add one programmer to the staff and say 'We are needing to program this stuff - what is and is not possible?'. Then we spend a few months on that. THEN we are ready to say 'make it so'."
Lost Continents' Travis McGeathy: "That's the way to do it. Too often, people just get a core idea down and start programming figuring they'll work it out on the way. They then end up spending 2-3x as long making the game because they're re-writing large portions of the code multiple times as the ideas change. It's usually best to have the design for the game fully fleshed out before any programming is done. You'll need to make some changes later as you uncover previously un-thought of problems, but they'll usually be relatively minor."
Logan: This might explain why some folks keep pushing back their development schedules!
Logan: Another quote, from Mark Cerny on the
Gamasutra states: "Pre-production is vital because you need to figure out what your design is going to be before you build it. So, what we see very frequently is that nobody's quite sure what the game is, but tremendous effort is put into creating the assets, the art, animation and so forth for that game. That doesn't work. What happens is later on you end up putting all the pieces together and you find out that you have a game not worth playing. Then you throw it all out and start again. So, pre-production is about concentrating all that work that gets tossed out into the very first few months of the game...Well, we spend a lot more than a million dollars on these projects. Pre-production is probably about 30% of your total budget. I mean, you will be spending money, so why not do it in a responsible fashion? So that means figure out what [game] you have first and either make it or don't make it. Put all together, this really saves you money. As a publisher, it doesn't cost you money."