Design Discussion CheckList

We should complete the following things before starting real work:

• Decide about (main) Programming Language and Coding Style
• Make some sketches about the overal story of the game
• Have a detailed story for milestone1
• Complete scripts for the cutscenes
• Sketches and desriptions of the characters
• Define possible actions and how to control them
• How are maps constructed
• Sketches and descriptions for the enemies. Don't forget to describe their behaviour
• Create a sketch of the menus and describe their functions
• Weapon sketches with description and how they are controlled
• Try to split the work to people actively helping on the project. So that everyone has his own part he works on. This avoids everyone focusing on everything which often leads to bugs because you don't understand other peoples code/intentions or because some areas are left unattended.

Engine Design:

• Outline the features needed for the engine
• Decide about technology
• Fix file formats (map, tiles, sprites/animations, scripts)
• How should collision detection and response be handled. Basically think about game mechanics.
• Create a rough class hirarchy
• Identify where scripts should be used and design a scripting API
• What interactions are needed between GameObjects, how to handle them
• How do we handle savegames, do we need to have serialisation support across the project or will we do simpler solutions?

PS: Its actually more Milestone2 or better Milestone3 then Milestone1, the former release was fully playable as well, it simply didn't provided that much.