Game Development Part 0: How we develop games

Hello to all and welcome to the first of series on the development of our first game.  In the very first post on our blog I introduced us and our goals.  In this post I will explain our method for developing amazing games.  First off their must be some sort of motivation, in the case of our first game a recent school project provided a much needed boost!  The school project centered around a book, in this case The Pacific.  This leads nicely into the first stage of game development, research.  Since all our games are meant to be educational research is very important.  Sadly, personal accounts of engagements can differ greatly, making this job rather challenging.  However, once we have gathered enough information we are ready to move on to the next stage, planning.  When planning we consider the basics, such as what scale the game shall be, how initiative and moral shall be handled, what dice will be used, how basic actions (shooting, moving) will be handled, and how large forces and playing areas should be to ensure a fun game.  Once all of this has been done we start writing.  This is broken done into several different steps, but they basically focus on developing the game in a logical manner.  Once a complete rule set has completed we release a "first draft" and announce open beta testing.  Beta testing focuses on testing a limited set of rules in rigid scenarios, mainly to help fix obvious issues.  When we have edited and tweaked the rules to fix the obvious problems, the complete rules with a much wider range of scenarios are released and the game enters alpha stage.  Alpha stage will still have minor issues that will be fixed as rapidly as possible, and when the errors have been fixed to a point we feel comfortable with we will announce it as finished.  After that it will be free for all to enjoy!  Stay tuned for more, as we are almost ready to begin development of our first game!