When it comes to designing the features and mechanics of a game, I believe in designing everything from the ground up with a purpose. What does the player need to see or learn when entering a particular area? How will a new enemy type change up the way a player plays? When would a player want to use one weapon or ability over another? I make sure to apply this approach consistently whenever I must take charge over a design.

Designing this way not only helps to keep a game's features consistent with its overall feel and aesthetic, but is also a helpful tool for controlling the moment to moment feel of a game and making sure every encounter makes the player do or feel something new. When everything is being finalized and it comes time to take features to the cutting room floor, this doctrine will simplify the process of deciding which features go and which remain since there will be greater clarity in how they all fit within the game's design space.

Any large project I work on has a design document, even if it is just a rough one and even if its just a solo project. This lets me keep all of my ideas in one place (instead of scattered in various notebooks) and makes it convenient to communicate these ideas with team members.

Something I practice extensively in my work is making it as simple and streamlined as possible to both understand and interact with my contributions to a project. This not only makes it easier for myself to quickly make edits to a feature or return to parts of a code base I have not used in a while, but also makes it exponentially easier for other team members to use my contributions themselves.

In service of making sure that my portion of a project is easy both me and other team members to use, I make a habit out of doing the following:

• I leave thorough comments when scripting.
• If I am in charge of design and realize I need to add a feature, I make sure to let other team members know ASAP so supporting assets (sounds/animations/etc.) can be made.
• If an Actor/GameObject/etc does not have a mesh or sprite (such as a spawner), I make sure to add a way to mark where and what the object is.
• If I in the least suspect another team member will need to know a level's layout, I make a paper design like the one on the right (you can click it to zoom). These are made in Adobe Illustrator.