RE: [GD-General] Architecture Design

[Tom F. <to...@mu...>]

Hmmm.... these words - "design technique" - what do they mean? :-)

I hate to break this to you, but generally we just open up a text editor and
start coding.

Obviously we do design stuff. And we redesign stuff that was a cheap hack
into decent solid systems. But so far I have never seen anyone ever document
anything in a game except script languages - and that's just because we let
outsiders write scripts. And the docs were _docs_ and written after the code
was, not _specs_ and written before.

We just find that games change so fast that any design is instantly out of
date by the time you write to code. You find the code needs to do something
different, needs to be adapted, needs to be quicker/cheaper, or needs to be
better and more robust. "Code rot" is a huge poblem anyway - adding the
"design" process would just make it even slower. And no, design wouldn't
help the code rot - these are _games_, not spreadsheets. At least 50% of
that is just coding something to see if it works and plays well.

IIRC, for StarTopia we had five different AI navigation systems (whittled
down to one), six different cameras (of which we only finally used three,
and two of those in very specific circumstances), several different method
of building/laying out things, loads of different UI panels and so on. We
_did_ have game design documents, but so much stuff that looks good on paper
ends up being wrong when put in a game. We will still do gameplay design
though, simply because it makes sure we're all signing from the same
songsheet. But we all know it will change massively through the project.

In these debates, there seem to be three sorts of people:

-People who have coded actual games.
-People who listen to people who have coded games.
-People who believe in design documents for games.

Tom Forsyth - Muckyfoot bloke.

What's he up to now (and can I have a go)?
http://www.eidosinteractive.com/downloads/search.html?gmid=86

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Parveen Kaler [mailto:pk...@sf...]
> Sent: 07 October 2001 23:10
> To: gam...@li...
> Subject: [GD-General] Architecture Design
> 
> 
> Just a little bit of a survey.  After the gameplay and story 
> of a game has 
> been somewhat fleshed out, what kind of techniques do you guys use to 
> design the code?  I'm assuming everyone uses diagrams such as 
> ORDs, ERDs, 
> and DFDs or some variant.  Is this true?  How detailed do you 
> guys get?
> 
> Does anyone get hardcore and actually use UML and tools like Rational 
> Rose?  Are there people out there who have worked on both 
> game projects and 
> common desktop applications?  How did the design techniques 
> differ, if at all?
> 
> Parveen