Game design from the beginning

[JonO]

For what it's worth, I'll give you some advice I wish I had gotten before I started a long time ago: Design the game completely before you start programming. Have everything written down in as much detail as you can possibly imagine and every screen drawn up in a graphics program. There will be changes and inspirations along the way, but working like this allows you to catch your mistakes when they are easy to fix. IBM once did a study and discovered that the same mistake, when caught in the preliminary design phase could be fixed in one hour, but if caught in the testing phase would take 25 hours to correct. It is a truism of programming that only 33% of all projects see the light of day and of those that don't, 75% are abandoned because of a lack of design phase work.

You should, of course, value this post for exactly what you paid for it.