Practical Game Design

Spending time creating systems

Diving into the game's final implementation with the hope of iterating later is always a bad idea. When building software, good engineering is required. The software has to be designed, just like the game. Systems need to be built before actual gameplay. Imagine a car racing game. The programmer needs to engineer a system that can handle different types of cars, with different values of speed, acceleration, braking, stability, and so on. He has to build this data system first, and only then will the designer be able to define the numbers and try them. When working on a prototype, the engineer should just hard-code the values the designer wants to try (maybe with a rudimentary system to expose those variables ...