How to DESIGN a Video Game

I'm finishing up a video game, and I never made a design document for it (I'll make a separate thread with details on my game soon). Sure, I scribbled tons of ideas and brainstorming in my sketchbook, so I guess you could call that a design document if you want? I imagine a more formal design document would be more important for a team, but not if you're programming it yourself.

Maybe my programming suffered a bit by the lack of organization, but I don't think I knew enough about the programming challenges I would encounter to have done much good with a more organized document. Sometimes you just gotta get in there and start coding and trying things out, to figure out what's fun, and adjust the game as you go. Being a designer + programmer gives you that kind of flexibility.

*Edit: What kind of game is it? I wonder if that makes a difference. Mine is fast paced about fast reaction time. I imagine a turn based and/or strategy game may need more organized planning?

I also mostly coded in C/C++ at school. Java was appearing near the end of my studies. I always used object orient programming in my own way. Now that I have just jumped into Java, I need to redo my thinking and do it in the right way. I think Java force the OO model much better asking you to think out of the box, while C++ could make you keep your old habbits.

If you know object oriented programming, it should not be that hard to model something. Do not do the whole application at once, do it part by part. I am currently working on a major project and that is what I am doing so. That might forces me to do some changes later, but at least I get to see if it works. And that is something important in computer technology, because in theory it always work but in practice it never does.

Library technician plug here: get an online account at the Quebec national library. They can give you access to most IT books online for free through books 24x7 or safari books. This is how I learned libGDX. You just need to prove that you live in quebec.

Of course, if you are designing alone, your design document is your notes or your head. Design documents are generally produced when working with large team.

I always just start small and build from there. So, maybe first you want to display cards in a hand. The card needs an image or color, a position in your hand (or in the deck), and a coordinate on the screen. Then maybe you want to be able to remove cards from your hand, so you make it that a player can click and drag on a card to remove it, and other cards fill that space. Now you want to draw cards from the deck. The deck could be an array of cards, so you remove the top one and add it to the last position in your hand.

Once you have that kind of stuff, you can start giving the cards abilities, like becoming a permanent thing on the board with health and a damage rating, or having a one time effect and going away. If you want to do this in the form of a document before coding it, I imagine it would be a similar process of just finding a starting point, and adding from there.

I am IT student as well. If I was as lost as you are, I'd do a little role-playing - figure you are a company that wants a product (programme) from you as a programmer. First you would have some conversations in which you would make a requirement analysis. You surely know what that is or you can read about it. Then you can formalize it into e.g. a UML model. The written text makes it easier to find substructures that form semantic sets that you then can either present graphically or in written form. These subparts should then be easier implementable.

Divide and conquer...

I only realize NOW that you actually wrote this last comment that what you mean when you say 'video game' is actually a virtual board game.

For that there are existing APIs and you should consider using them, as they make a lot of things easier. Otherwise consider writing an API yourself before actually coding 'a' game.

Then writing any other game will be simnple as hell...
just a suggestion.

It's all a matter of practice. It's like relational database design, even if you know how it works, you need to do modeling exercise first. There is probably online some object modeling exercise. (no coding, only on paper)

In modeling, there is no absolute good or bad answer. Some models will have more or less features than other but can perfectly do the job.

Yes and no, on the Iphoe market people are more likely to pay for a software than on the adroid market. But you need a monotouch licence (approx 100$) and you need an apple computer to make the application (apple's restriction).

I am using LibGDX because you code your game once, and you can deploy on Desktop, Android, IOS, BlackBerry and WebGL, all at once.