tokumaru wrote:
That not advised even when you're working alone, but when you are part of a team this kind of documentation is an absolute requirement!
Professional game makers can't just get together at a bar one night, toss a few ideas about a plumber that eats mushrooms and go home to work on whatever part of the game they think is relevant. They must sketch the whole idea, and create the basic rules before they can develop it any further.
In fact we might even be surprised how they planify everything and do code last.
As you said, we wants to say results immediately, this is our nature and this is perfectly normal.
I've recently found an article about a FDS RPG that was going to be released on 5 disks, and that was given up early in the development, despite some japanese people already having pre-ordered it. Too bad I don't remember where I read that... I found that "by accident" when I was investigating prototypes though. They said there was no chances of finding leaked prototypes of games that never made it even close to being finished.
So yeah, how comes that they knew the game would fit 5 sides, but have given up very early in the development ? Also how comes people could pre-order a game that was just starting to get developped ?
The only answer is that they planned everything, estimating how many bytes it would takes. Also, they could develop a game in only a couple of months (not that this would make a good game though).
Or this could also as well be fake / distorted / mistranslated info. Especially since I don't remember the site, it was a site about prototypes.