Considering the XNA Framework comes with complete game starter kits, how come there are no game and code design documents included with the kits? Surely the coders of these games did not just sit down at the keyboard and start typing?

I just started larning C# and all the programming books on the language I read tell you how important it is to design before sitting down to the keyboard? I’ve also had the pleasure of doing some freelance game dialogue writing for a commercial game and, while at the developers offices, I saw plenty of design documents in a ‘Game Design Bible’ - so professional game devs appear to place great importance on design stages and documentation.

Yet despite this, game programming litrature frequently fails to mention or cover the design stages. Maybe this is because, as you have observed, most tutorials and books focus on using the various parts of a framework rather than on the design of an actual game itself - but surely there’s no excuse for the starter kits code?

I’m especially interested in learning how to use common tools and methods for designing code in this day and age of Object-Oriented programming. Tools such as UML, Use Cases etc. Are these design tools and methodologies even used by game programmers? If so we certainly need to see more of this side of game design.

Awesome blog by the way, keep it up :)

Thank you very much for the feedback! It means a lot to me to know that this site helped someone get familiar with XNA. I hope I can keep up with it and deliver more tutorials you’d find useful.