Do you have a checklist when creating leveling content or do you just take your story line and run with ideas as they come?

I'm the only person actively working on my game right now so I'm sort of just writing down whatever ideas come to my mind as they hit me and they aren't always about the same thing so I feel like I'm pissing in the wind for the most part.

Beyond that, do you guys have a checklist for developing the entire game? What comes first? UI development or Character Creation? Story line or Combat mechanics? Those are rhetorical, but you get my idea.

Well, I think for text-based games you have to mainly concentrate on storyline.. But while you're doing that I don't see any reason why you can't work on the basic UI and functionality of your system.

Ie, creating simple items or types of items (glass objects for example, with effects like breaking.. Or musical instruments etc), or creating the way that you get a response for typing the wrong thing.

I'm working on am MMO game too. There's not much story and I mainly just work on the bits I come up with as they come to me. I worked mainly on the features first, shops, inventory, levelling, that sort of thing. Then went back and made all the printed messages conform to a standard, a use colouring for specific meanings, such as yellow means money, green is speech.

It's a good idea to sit down for a while and just think about the sotry. As an MMO though you'll have to have pleny on the side other than the main plot and if there are different races then they may have different main plots. Get the setting of your game established, time preiod, how magic works, technology available, current social standings, economics, where non-human races come from, creation story or general time line leading up to when the story starts in your game. It's a lot of work.

I've been working on my game for 2-3 years now.