Log 5 - Design Design Design!

Pico² is releasing on Feb 9th 2025! Follow on itch.io for updates!

See the Pico² Design Document!

It’s the bit everyone dreads - design!

This is the whole reason I’m doing this project - to force myself to actually design a game fully before jumping into PICO-8.

I started by creating some requirements. These are features and experiences I want the player to have.

Each requirement has:

• An ID, to refer to in the writing
• A name, for shorthand
• A description, clearly stating what the player will get out of this
• A priority, indicating how important this feature is to create my vision
• An assigned milestone, creating structure to the development process

Like this, everything I want out of the game from a high-level perspective is laid out clearly.

Next, I created headings in my design document for each section the player will interact with. For example, I have one for the main menu, the world selection, level selection, and the puzzle itself.

Each heading has a question - for example, the Endgame and Credits heading has the question, “What happens when the player completes the final puzzle?” I like writing these so I have a clear goal in mind: answering this specific question.

In each of these headings, I wrote:

• The flow: Outline what the typical interaction looks like for this section.
• The actions: List every way the user can physically interact with this section (controller mapping).
• Mockups: Without including final art, design the visual structure of this section.
• Any other information, such as algorithms and notes.

This was so valuable, as I could easily edit parts of one section once I’d completed another. The whole game is clearly laid out from start to end, and I can start to think about how much space I have in code/memory.

I have to do proper art in Aseprite, but I’m going to start programming in PICO-8 tomorrow! 🎉🎉 I still need some hands-on experimentation to find how much space I’ll actually have for all the artistic flourishes I have planned.

Stay tuned for more updates! (and actual pretty screenshots instead of console outputs and word docs)

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