Appendix A. Planning, Resources, and Legal Issues

Our game is now complete! We've implemented all the features that our game requires, including sound and visual effects, and we've also considered the commercial aspects of our game and examined how to benefit financially from our hard work.

Because this is a practical guide book, we jumped straight into the development of our game in Chapter 2, Let's make a game!. Quite understandably, we just wanted to learn the required skills and get our game up and running. After all, rolling up our sleeves and getting our hands dirty is always good fun when it comes to game development!

Although it's fun to jump in and to start creating a game, when first learning the tools of the trade, in practice, it's not the most advisable way to develop a successful game—it's a good idea to put some plans into place first and also to ensure that we have all the right tools for the job.

In this final section of the book, we'll take a quick look at the basics of planning a game, and we'll also consider some of the third-party tools and resources that can help us in the development of our games. Finally, we'll reflect upon some of the legal issues that we, as developers, must take into account before presenting our completed game to the public.

The topics we'll be investigating are:

• The planning process

• Third-party tools

• Third-party assets

• Additional resources

• Legal issues

• Progressing with Stencyl game development