How do you plan?

[Calin Leafshade]

I've actually just started using a Wiki to plan my game.. i dunno how useful it will turn out to be but for collaborative projects i would imagine it would be awesome.

[TerranRich]

That's actually a really good idea. I had started one for my game, but I abandoned it soon thereafter, as I got caught up in creating wiki templates and formatting it just right.

[Calin Leafshade]

That's actually a really good idea. I had started one for my game, but I abandoned it soon thereafter, as I got caught up in creating wiki templates and formatting it just right.

Ha ha its like youre watching over my shoulder... 

[Jimbob]

Lots of notebooks, post-it notes, scrap pieces of paper, lots of random txt files scattered over three computers, sprites filling up several folders over the aforementioned computers, some spread in random folders on my images webspace, using notes in my mobile phone, changing my mobile phone but copying them into defunct file types onto my computer that I don't know how to open and generally keeping a lot of stuff in my head and never putting it down anywhere...

So I don't, basically. Although in this foray into making an adventure game I bought (another) new notebook and it currently is serving me well. And it's managed to keep itself to one folder on my harddrive so far...

I've thought about wiki's but they've been over complex to keep organised in a sensible way, and more time is wasted on it, instead of using it.

I've used Google Docs as a decent means of following the testing of games, share a testing file with a few beta testers, especially where text, spelling and grammar are concerned, it allows thoughts about particular passages be discussed without a complete new thread/page be created (as long each user keeps the text a recognised colour etc... (used it to help test The Spirit Engine 2 and a couple of the Fedora Spade games if you've heard of them)
Not great as a means of planning and developing though :S

My favourite way is to begin with a brain dump of all the related ideas on a single piece of paper, for them to be arranged somewhere neatly in a text/word doc.

Not that it helps me to finish anything

[Chicky]

Good advice above