Shipwreck - The Plan
So here’s the plan,
I’m going to design and code this game in public, as I go along.
this game is not supposed to be releasable, fully playable, or anything like that at this point. Instead this is a prototype of how a real game might look.
Therefore, the game design will quite possibly be not fully balanced, and will be simple.
I favour Agile (Extreme Programming) development, so I will be only building as much complexity as I need, as I go. however, in real Extreme Programming, I would normally have a customer. That’s a person who has an idea in their head of where we are going, and what things are the most important to them.
In order to provide something like that I’ve started to write essentially a very basic design document. This is what would be in my customers head. From it I am going to generate stories, which are single units of development.
The overall plan is to attempt to finish a system that allows user registration, players to create a character, explore the game world, spend time units, and potentially even fight something. All developed within a month.
To achieve that, I need to not think about creating a lasting codebase that is beautiful, I need to instead get down and get stuff working. I will be applying my software design principles to try to write good code, however I will not be attempting to build a framework that could run any MMO, various game specific things will be hard coded within the model, and the system structure.
So that’s that’s the plan, it’s crazy, it’s stupid, and it probably wont work. But it will be interesting to see what I come up with.
Design notes are being transfered onto the wiki provided at http://code.google.com/p/shipwreck and code for the shell has already gone up, the rest will follow as I do it.