Practical Game Design

Player progression flow

First, I mapped known features and milestones in the game against Command Center levels. This diagram has been created as a drawing inside our game design document (the GDD itself was a Google Docs text file). Once we were happy with it, I printed several copies, stuck one of them on the wall and gave out the rest to the people responsible for planning the production (producer and art director), as well as to every single programmer on the team.

Interestingly enough, we all knew that the game would go beyond Command Center 11 (we actually made data for 16 CC levels and held some back, releasing the first 14 on game launch), but we also knew no new features would be locked by or planned for that late in:

Simplified ...