FMP 2 - planning, July 7th

When embarking on a project of any size, actual progress is much faster and more consistent if you try to plan out what youre gonna do before you start. To that end I tried briefly jotting down which elements I would need for my demo to be complete, after which I could easily go into detail with each point when I arrived at it (note: These points were all part of my planning document).

Note: I am planning to do everything myself.

• Design:
• Decide on the general look of the game
• Characters:
• Main character - look and animation
• Side character(s) - friendly 'partners'. Look and animation/personality
• Friendly NPCs - look, animation, personality, part in story
• Enemy NPCs - fauna, look, animation, battle statistics and possible tactics.

• 3D objects
• Flora - trees and flowers, leaves, bushes
• Rocks and stones
• Water objects, boats, lilypads, bridges perhaps
• Tents, crates, barrels and so forth. Objects for populated areas
• Possible enemies/characters
• 2D objects
• Flora - bushes, leaves, flowers and so forth.
• Miscellaneous objects
• Programming
• Movement system
• Character - running, jumping, interacting
• Partner - follows the main character
• Enemies - moving around, attacking, misc.

•  Combat system
• Turn-based combat, experience awarding, seamless join and exit combat scenes
• GUI-system 
• Log health, experience, items and the like. 
• Dialogue system
• Seamlessly load and display dialogue betwen characters in game
• Loading text files and parsing through them
• Combining with either GUI or in-game text to display conversation

• Miscellaneous points, like flickering fire, moving water and particle systems.

As you can see, this is a mouthful, but if we aren't ambitious then we can never acheive lofty goals either. I want this project to be good enough to get possibly Steam greenlit at some point.