I was working on my gameplay and writing my game’s design “doc”, and was planning to code some parts of the gameplay. I had some tasks listed in front of me, but I somehow couldn’t keep all the balls in the air simultaneously. So to speak.

I thought it was slightly difficult to proceed further with just these notes of mine.

So I did what I often do: drew a flow chart describing the main gameplay. I don’t know if I’ve mentioned this but I use flow charts (with my own customish syntax) to describe some aspects of the game. I feel that these charts are good in capturing the idea of certain issues.

So, I took my precious pen and draw a chart. It describes how the gameplay works: what happens first, how location is selected, how game progresses, and how game is won. It doesn’t explain everything, for example “resolving challenges” is not explained here – it’s a job for another flow chart or textual description, but this pic gives a pretty good overall view on how things work.

Using both my notes and this chart, I can continue coding.

Flow charts for very beginners
Basically, flow charts explain states. You may draw boxes/diamonds and write things like “Is leader?” and then have two arrows (one with word “no” and another with word “yes”) pointing to two different boxes which describe what happens in certain conditions.

A drawing makes things so much easier, so here’s an example flow chart describing the process of how reading this blog works.

Pretty slick, eh?

This entry was posted on Thursday, August 19th, 2010 at 6:40 pm and is filed under Indie Development. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.