Re: Game Design in General.


25 Aug 1995 23:02:41 GMT

In article <41iovr$afh@agate.berkeley.edu>
whizzard@uclink.berkeley.edu (Gerry Kevin Wilson) writes:

[How do *you* design IF games.]

Well, I am probably not qualified to answer this, since I haven't ever
written a IF game, and I'm not really in the process of doing so
(though I have got a game on hold at the moment). But anyway, the way
I started was to think up an overall idea for the game: a sort of
amorphous setting/"plot"/characters combination. Once I've added thet
things I definitely want/need in the game, I start to figure out if
anything else is demanded not by my conception of the game but by what
I've done so far. For example, if the game is set in a house, should I
include some typical "house trappings", even though these are not a
part of the interesting bits of the game that I've designed.

And that's it, really. To be slightly more helpful, I like writing
things down in a somewhat structured format. Like, a description of
the game, the setting, the characters, the objects, the "plots". Also,
after that's done, the more technical details: particular scripts for
characters (not in code, just description), details of any particular
physics that will be needed, and so on. Then, I guess, it's just a
matter of writing all the code.

Jamie