*Planted: Nov 2024 | Last Tended: Nov 2024* 1. Roughly sketch out the vision for how the feature fits into the game in its shippable form. Just enough to see how it fits into the game and where it can go, but not so deep that it’s inflexible for iteration.  2. Decide what level of fidelity this feature needs to be for the current milestone. Does it only need to be barebones in order to facilitate a more important feature, or is it more of a cornerstone feature that needs to have some touch and feel to be “done” enough for this milestone? 3. Identify the first set of functionality that has to be built: “the player has to be able to do A, B, and C”. This will usually by necessity be almost purely functional and with little touch and feel development.  4. Anticipate and identify anything missing from the game that would have to touch on this feature. These are usually identified as the features that cause us to say, “but in order for us to do X, we have to do Y, too.” Identify the Ys, and then — more importantly — either decide to ignore Y in favor of making scoped progress on X, or make whatever assumptions you feel you can make about Y to make scoped progress on X.  5. Once that first set of functionality in step 3 is built for the feature, evaluate it: 1. Is it enough functionality to enable the gameplay you want the player to experience?  2. Is the feature understandable? Is anything about the flow or how to engage with the feature confusing?  3. Did we get as far as we can with X without developing the Ys we identified in Step 4? Is it useful to continue iterating X without doing Y? 4. Is more iteration on the touch and feel required for this feature to feel “done for now”, meaning that it’s done for the level of fidelity you identified in step 2? 6. Iterate depending on the answers in Step 5, until you reach “done for now” 1. See [[🌿 Defining “Done”]]