Of Design Docs and Timelines: A love story

One of the more mundane tasks of any programming venture is the project documentation. You basically have to say of each and every piece “It needs to do this and this, and when you do this it needs to react like this and that, but not when you do this and this.” You need to give a plain language overview, and then a technically specific piece as well. And, for a general document like the one I just finished, you aren’t even doing all of the work you need to. There’s a second, much more in depth step that requires you to take those requirements and flesh them out in crazy detail so that when you go to actually program the thing, you’re not guessing at what you’re supposed to be doing.

So this is the phase that Among the Silent Stars is in right now. The 1.0 version of the design document for the game engine is done. The timeline is about 50% done in Microsoft project, and we’re looking at a game engine development cycle of until the beginning of March next year. Woof!

Aside from all of this, I learned in my perusing of the XNA website yesterday that the maximum game size for and XNA game on Xbox is 150 MB! Yeah, that’s less than the size of an RPG from ten years ago. This is very frustrating. I am told that XNA has great compression ability, and if that’s the case, then so be it. However, I’m a little boggled that Microsoft wants to put such a silly limit on our games. We’re the ones putting our time and effort into this, why shouldn’t we be able to make our games any size we want? And what about those who want to buy the games? Why shouldn’t they be able to buy games of any size?

This seems arbitrary and frustratingly like the Xbox team who is brilliant in their design and technical side, but terribly hard to understand in their decisions about access, size limits, and marketing.

Well, back to ATSS. I begin spec design on the first item on the timeline tomorrow. It’s a piece that I have not yet tech demoed, so I’m looking forward to bashing my head against the concrete pillars of my dank basement office and screaming into the darkness for the rats to stop their squeaking to just LET ME THINK! I think I will need a lot of tea and pastries from Panera to keep me sane.