Planning the Heist Before Buying the Masks
Here’s my pattern: I come up with a game theme that I’m obsessed with but can’t find mechanics to match. Or I think of some really satisfying mechanic and then spend weeks trying to force a theme onto it. Both ways end the same — a half-started project and a folder of abandoned prototypes.
This time feels different. Raccoon crime boss running a crew out of a storm drain, sending specialists on heists across the neighborhood. The theme and the mechanics actually clicked at the same time. So instead of doing what I normally do — jumping straight into Unreal and figuring it out as I go — I’m doing something I’ve never really committed to before. I’m planning the whole thing out first.
And I mean all of it. Not just “here’s a bullet list of features.” I’m talking every system, how they connect, what depends on what, the implementation details, the design rationale. I want to find the dependency issues and the design holes now, before I’ve spent three weeks building something that doesn’t fit. I know I want things like a gamble system where you choose to scrap or sell an ambiguous valuable — but I also know that for the MVP, valuables can just auto-convert to currency and I expand from there. Think big, build small, and know exactly where the small turns into the big.
So today I took the GDD and broke it into a living wiki. Every raccoon class, every raid target, every station, every system — all on its own page, linked together, tagged by what’s MVP and what’s not. It’s the design bible and eventually… it’s just the actual game wiki. Double duty.
Next up: Nailing down the pitch and design pillars, then starting Block 1 in Unreal.
Changelog
- Built project wiki from existing GDD
- Organized into sections: Overview, Design, Art, Audio, Production, Devlog, Research
- Stubbed out pages for all units, stations, raid targets, and systems
- Tagged everything by scope (
#scope/mvp/#scope/post-mvp) - Added note templates and naming conventions