Thursday, February 9, 2012

Design to Product on Android - Game Design (7 / 17)

Finally, we can start making a game!!! Let's crack open our favorite Integrated Development Environment (Eclipse in this case) and start forging all that hot code all over the place... err wait, what am I going to make?!  Oh who cares, I can make a game/product on the spot!

Whoah easy there code vigilante!  Let's take a moment to actually design what we're doing first.  Again, in software engineering, lots of people assume that programmers just make code.  Well, that's nice, but there probably should be at least some documentation in terms of what are the features needed in a project to make. Programmers use this as a roadmap (and even a task list) of what they need to make.  Once made, it serves doubly useful as a checklist of what to test to make sure the product was made correctly.  Remember, at this point, we're not even talking about software design, just the content of the product itself -- not even code yet!

Of course, testing the product is a fairly large topic in itself as well and will likely get its own article.  Suffice to say, an acceptance test looks at a design, looks at a software product and then validates and verifies that the product is what was desired in the first place -- thus it is accepted as the product.

We will come back to game design on and off throughout the series.

*** Updated section ***
Originally, we did not post the game design here because it wasn't finalized, plus we didn't want the "spoilers" of the actual game getting out before we really thought the whole game through.  Since the product was posted, the finalized game design can be found here:
BubbleZing game design

This game design document was first linked when we released the product at the end of this series, but is now retroactively linked here for convenience.
*** End new section ***

Next up, let's start analyzing what kind of art specifications and styles we want to incorporate in the game.  Once our design was completed, we started toying with ideas of what it should look like, the theme, how to go about generating/acquiring the art assets.  So, next up is the design of the art itself.

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