How are we actually going to do all of these things? There is a simple idea I want to show you that will naturally make you take the right approach if you use it. Instead of thinking about making your game like a book, where you start at the beginning and then keep going until it’s finished, we’re going to think about it like building with Lego bricks. We will break our game idea down into a list of specific features, and then break each feature down into a set of logic or math problems that we can solve one at a time. Then we prioritize the most important features, and solve every technical problem that game will require. Once we have solved them all, we will have learned everything we need to know in order to actually just write our game from front to back. Using our demos as reference we will combine all the things we have learned into larger and larger demos, until we have a working game! At this point, we are able to spend time on things like art, music, story, etc.
By putting the most important things first, we will have the luxury of taking some time at the end to make our art as good as it can be, and we won’t waste time on making things look nice when they don’t really work yet.