Major Decisions

Designers can’t leap right in and start work at the nuts-and-bolts level. Although such a “bottom-up” approach may work for smaller tasks, virtual worlds are too complex for this. If you were designing a cruise liner, you wouldn’t start by specifying the décor for cabins. Yes, at some point you would need to do it, but there are other things that are more important; some are even so important that they impact on it (the cabin’s dimensions, its window sizes, furniture access, and so on).

So it is for virtual worlds. Some things have to be decided first, because they affect what is decided later.

Most of these have already been introduced in this book, so now let’s look at them in detail.