Taking a crack at game development

[Hoeloe]

E-Man, it's fine that you have started planning the story, but I think you should start by planning gameplay and testing out gameplay concepts. You have to develop a game with the mindset that you're making a game, not a movie or book, and therefore gameplay should be thought up first.

I'm not trying to discourage you from planning the story, it's just that many modern games focus on story first and gameplay second, and suffer because of it.

There's nothing particularly wrong with planning the story first, but you should always keep in mind whether a particular story element would be fun to play. For example, if your story involves collecting things, you have to be very careful about how it's done, because wandering around places looking in every corner of places you've already explored looking for one item is a pain and often not fun.

There's no problem in having an idea of how the story will go before you go through the details of the gameplay, but Paladin is right that gameplay has to be considered as a part of that. I personally find that a game is best when the story and gameplay complement each other. Either you can tweak the gameplay to work with the story, which is really hard, or tweak the story to work with the gameplay, which is easier. Alternatively, how I like to do it is to get a basic overview of both, and then intertwine them in the details, to make sure the story works with the gameplay, and the gameplay works with the story.