Your Game Plan: The Why’s and How’s of Your Game Plan

I remember when I first realized I could make video games I got really excited and decided I wanted to just right in head first. I downloaded programming software, played around with it and just started making a game. After a while everything became very difficult to do and I was forced to make decisions I wasn’t ready to. I had nothing planned out and I didn’t even know what kind of video game I waned to make. All I knew was that I wanted to make one and become a millionaire like the guys over at Bungie.
You've probably noticed what things are wrong with what I did. Heck, if you’ve even found this article you’re probably feeling the same way too; you just wanna go out and make a game. That’s good that you have enthusiasm and energy but we have to put all of this in good use by making a well developed GAME PLAN. I don’t know if making a plan first sounds stupid or if you think it’ll slow down your process, but this is the FIRST MOST IMPORTANT STEP YOU WILL MAKE!!!! You NEED a plan because you need to know what you want to do, what you can do, what works and what doesn’t and you need to know all of these things before you do anything. Your game plan will determine whether or not your game sinks or floats because with a very good well developed plan, you’re game will most likely be a very good and enjoyable one. Your plan has to allow your game to flow and if it doesn’t, players won’t stay to play your game. The level of game flow is the first thing players notice when they play your game and the first thing that allows them to determine whether or not they want to continue playing.
Making a good game plan can sometimes be easy and sometimes be hard, but in the end, worth every lasting moment. Since you’re most likely a beginner you will probably not be able to make extraordinarily amazing and detailed graphics and you may not be able to program a fighting system like the one in Prince of Persia: Two Thrones. It’s OK if you can’t though. You can still make an amazing awesome game without all of these things. Since you won’t have many of the things AAA games have, you will need to fall back on a very well planned game outline. Think of your game plan as your storyline, like in the original Star Wars movies, the special effects sucked compared to what we have nowadays. What makes these movies memorable is their storyline. The audience has this great adventure to fall back on, so they can still enjoy the movie with out the crazy amazing special effects because the storyline is so good that it supports the movie.
To help understand a game plan better, we’ll be writing a plan to make a copy-cat version of the original Pong game. I’ve chosen this game because it’s simple and most everyone has at least heard of it, so it will make learning how to write a plan much easier. We will also make this game with Flash Macromedia because it’s a very good beginner’s program. (If you don't have the program, it's okay because we're not actually making a video game.)

1. What’s your goal?
You need to figure out what it is you want to do. In our case, it’s making Pong.

2. What’s your platform?
Our platform will be the PC. To get more detailed, the internet. Flash allows you to export the files so you can upload them on to the internet and host them on a server. Nice.

3. Player interactiveness
How will our player interact with the program? We’ll be programming this game so that the player can use the arrows on their keyboard to move the pong player up and down.

4. The opponent
The player will be playing against the computer that will follow the ball wherever it goes. Since we want the players to win every now and then we’ll program some sort of mechanism that slows the AI’s ability to catch the ball every time.

5. Environment Physics
The environment is the game and every game has some sort of physics set in place. To better understand the physics element, think of this as a list of rules that the program has to abide by.
• In our case, we have to think about the physics or rules necessary for Pong game play. The ball will bounce off of the player paddles and the top and bottom sections of the environment or ‘screen area’.
• The ball will bounce in such a way that will allow the players to control the direction the ball moves
i. If the ball hits dead centre of the paddle, the ball will bounce perpendicular to the paddle
ii. The further away from the centre the more angled the ball will bounce off
• The longer the ball is in play, the faster it goes.
• If the ball passes either paddle a point is scored to the opponent.
• When a point is scored, the ball is reset and placed back into play.
• The winner is the first to score five points.
• When the game ends, the player will be directed towards the main screen with the option to replay the game.

6. Look and feel
What will the game look will? What kind of colour schemes will it have? Is it 3D or 2D?
For our game, it’s going to have a retro 2D look to it. The only colours will be black and white.

As you can see this plan isn’t very complicated. Maybe now you can see in what ways the game can get complicated, especially when you think about the environment physics and game play.
One thing that helps when developing a game is to look at it in the most basic way as possible. Let’s say you want to make a more advanced version of Pong. (This is actually what I’m doing right now.) I’m making a more modern version of Pong just for fun. One of the things I needed to do first is look at the original Pong. That is the most basic my program can get. Now that I’ve studied the basic Pong and programmed it, I decided to come up with different ways to enhance it like adding obstacles in the screen environment that the ball can bounce off of. This makes the game play more complicated because now you either try and avoid these obstacles or use them to your advantage.
Just remember, build your game from the base up. Once you have a strong base you can begin to add layers like how I’ve been doing. This makes building the game less of a hassle because most of the time people are doing too much at once and then get disorganized and the game turns to slops. So remember to start with a good base and build it up to where you want it to be. In order to do this you have to think outside of the box and look at your game in the simplest way possible.

Hope this helps!!!!

-YoYo