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I have a lot to plan out for this game, and I’m not 100% sure where to start. I do know I have three phases of development in mind. I’m coming at this with almost zero experience planning a project of this scale, but between me, YouTube, and ChatGPT, I’ve figured out what I want to do so far.
My goal is to develop in three phases.
Phase one
In this phase, I’ll be designing all the elements of the game. The art is mostly done already, aside from a few things that need to be custom-made or tweaked. This phase is about getting all the parts finished and creating the core coding for the mechanics. My idea is to make level development and design extremely easy—almost like drag and drop.
I know this might sound silly to seasoned devs, but too many times I’ve been 80% done with a game before realizing I made a mistake, then I have to open up 100+ levels to fix the same thing over and over. I really want to avoid that.
I’ve made mistakes in the past, but this is part of my learning process. I want level design to go quickly, and if I already have all the assets and mechanics ready, I believe everything will come together smoothly. I sort of imagine building levels like in Mario Maker: if I need a Buzzsaw asset, it’s coded to work and I can just drop it in without much (or any) tweaking.
I’m pretty sure most games are built this way, but I know from experience that doing things out of order can cause problems, so hopefully this plan will me with that.
Phase Two
In this phase, I’ll focus on designing the levels—96 of them in total—using the finished assets from Phase One. I’ll need to test things during Phase One, so I’ll probably have one or two levels for each of the eight worlds/maps, which will also need tweaking. My plan is to keep a production journal handy so if I come up with ideas while coding in Phase One, I can sketch them out to use in Phase Two.
My biggest worry here is not having enough content from Phase One to build all 96 levels, so I’ll have to figure out how to address that when the time comes.
Phase Three
This phase will be for music and polish—tightening up the levels, making sure everything works, and getting my friends to test. The most important thing for me is that I’m proud of whatever I have when it’s finished, that I’ve given it my all, and that people enjoy it.
