Well of course you gotta know what you actually want to do before you start doing just something.

"Start with" was more or less ment for the point where you know what you want and you are in front of the decission of creating levels first and look how you can bring them to life or you start with simpel test levels to create your functionallity and then just replace the environment when it works.

I think the second one is better because the environment can be replaced more easily.


Of course I had a quite specific vision in my mind when I started creating Dragonrise.
I had a basic storyline and my main characters and the important points of the story where those characters meet and what results from those situations.
On the other hand I was quite sure what kind of game system I want to have (well this slightly changed after 2 years, for better without having too much to change).

So based on this (storyline, characters and game system) I started making those technical thoughts I described above.


Maybe I just focused too much on the engineering part, but you're totally right that both are important and I guess I'm in a lucky situation since I'm an artist with pencil, brush and coal and studied arts in my free time and on the other hand I studied software engineering for 2 years at university.
And 3rd my father became a novel writer during the last years and I gained a lot of it, I think because of this I was able to create the storyline in detail now, which I was not able to in earlier years.

All in all I have to admit that creating your own world is a quite hard task because it needs much more than those thoughts you have as a gamer start with "Oh you know what would be a cool game?".


But my time for GS is running low because of my browser game with more than 2.000 registrations during the last 2.5 years. Well (character/level) modelling and animating for 3D projects takes a lot of time and is main reason why I will stop Dragonrise after the next demo, but if he takes some people into his boat to do the different jobs maybe he won't be slowed down by a singe task.


But Blade, I kind of know what situation you are in and judging your post you feel quite attacked or only disappointed because others are not like you saying "Oh my god, this is what I waited for since I read the fist book!".
In the beginning you're blinded by the vision of your own ideas and first creations and simply don't understand what those yerks actually have to critisize but... they are right and bring you up to the position where you are able to judge you project as neutral as they do.
Even harder it will be to accept critique about a system you invented by your self but which turns out not as good as expected, you'll be blinded by your idea, but others are not.