The idea for the game

It's always a good idea to have some kind of plan. While most of game development is iterative, it doesn't hurt to communicate the vision of the game.

The most important thing when developing is to remember the scope. It's very important to keep the scope as small as possible; in most situations, you still have to cut gameplay elements out in latter stages of the development cycle.

So saying we are going to create the next Angry Birds with more levels is probably as unrealistic as saying we're going to develop the next World of WarCraft just with more weapons and quests.

Let's put our goals and expectations into a list. The following is the list of goals we have for this book:

The following is the list of expectations we have out of this book:

Most independent games generally focus on a single mechanic and polish it to the maximum. Tiny Wings and Snapshot are good examples.

As with all software, there is always the danger of becoming a feature creep, which means adding all kinds of features during development without planning for it or balancing. In the end, the game might have all the features we want, but these features might be mutually exclusive and the game might not be fun.

So keeping in mind the scope and limitations, let's make a list with our features and gameplay elements for our game: