Making games can be hard or easy, fast or enslaving, depends on what you're trying to make...

But as a free-time game developer I suggest you make a plan of your game first. And then get people to help you do it.

Start making your game documentation. Write in it everything you want your units/menus/bullets/background/whatever_you_choose to be able to do. Then write down all states and co-relations between these objects. Then, when you're finished writing the document (3-X months later) start making the game by getting at least 2 more enthusiasts to help you along.

My experience as BojZGames programmer
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SpacePirates Chapter 0 : Revange (current project)

I told my friends that it would be about time for us to make a game, something easy, a space shooter. I wrote the "stuff" that would be in the game on a sheet of paper in 15 min not knowing what a game plan really is. It was October 2002, I think.

So we decided to make it, everyone got his/her part in the development process, I am the programmer, Crt is making the 3d gfx for rendering, Dex is drawing the GUI, Uzo and DejZ made the music. We also have one more programmer, who is currently learning C# and DirectX, he's not actively working on this project.

I took us about,.. well it's almost 5 months so far but the game is still not finished.

I could be, though, if we made a REAL PLAN in the first place. But nooooo, why should we, we're super-brainiacs,heroes,fill-in-the-gap. We don't need paper, we need code and 1s and 0s!

We'll just get the ideas and "rules" along the way. And we did. And we rewrote/fixed the code about a zbilionity times so far. What happened was that the code wasn't prepared for all those neat little add-ons that we decided to pack into our game.

And at the n-th code rewrite I've decided to arrange meetings for the whole team to gather on a weekly basis and discuss the progress of the game. It helps. A lot. We're patching the "game plan" at those meetings. Everyone "reports" their progress and we so far managed to stay afloat. It doesn't look our ship is sinking, and I think it's the meetings that got us here.

The team still has what it takes to make a game from the beginning to the end. The goal of our first game is to finish it and to learn how to evaluate everyone's capabilities, as an individual and as a team member.

The next game we're making will be an isometric Commandos-scroller game. Anyone had a C64?

What I see as "profit" that you get from spending time on the plan is the team coordination, everyone know what needs to be done on their part.

If we knew what enemies and items will be in the game, Crt would be able to draw all the gfx regardless of my programming progress. The same goes for music and so on...

So DO make a plan before you plunge yourself into programming the game. I know WE will. =)

The result of our work so far can be found at
http://redpoint.no-ip.com/bojzgames
(the page is NOT updated, but the game files are)

Direct download link is
http://redpoint.no-ip.com/bojzgames/...cepirates0.zip

I hope it works on you computer... =)