I released my first game last week on Steam. All of the game was done myself (art/programming/sound).
Pretty much all the planning for making any of my games happens on paper in notebooks before anything happens on a computer. Including a series of scans from my notebook of planning stages.
Initial Design/Characters
This would have been the first page where I thought roughly about the characters, screen layout and how many levels will be in the game. The stats related to characters ended up changing a bunch and I never used the idea of changing the attack range for each enemy.
Level Design
Above are two of the plans for level design. First is the Shrine level (level 1) and the second is the town level (level 3). The final designs in the game differ slightly after doing proper collision testing and based on the sizing of some of the pixel tiles came out. I did a little planning before this stage to figure out how many "sections" for each level I wanted. 10 seemed to be a solid number in terms of variety and timing to finish the stage. The important thing is that the greyboxed versions of the levels made more sense than trying to fit the visual design into the level itself.
Asset Design
The above two images are from planning sessions for what assets I would need to create for each level. This was done while either searching for historic paintings/photographs or from watching historic films. Planning included thinking about visual elements as well as interactive elements.
Cinematic Design
The last two images here are my storyboards for the opening cinematic scenes. The next stage was to do rough outlines digitally and figure out what would need to change before adding more detail. All the cinematics after this point were done digitally. I also threw the first version of the drawings in the game engine to make sure the pacing fit.
Thanks a lot of reading and please checkout my game on steam! It's super cheap ($1)!
