Designing a game and how to plan it on paper.

About a year ago I designed this pretty sweet snake game. I want to design one again and I want it to be really good code.

I am in the planning faze now and I was hoping that I can get some help with planning classes and variables. Obviously I know how to make graphics and I know how to get the game to work. But now I would like to create it as if I was going to update it. I want to use smarter code so that I can just update classes and methods instead of throwing the whole thing off because it is coded poorly. Catch my drift?


So the first questions is how should I be looking at this to design the best classes?

Code:

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*Start game - title screen appears.
*Two click-able "start" and "options"
*options just has a series of options like speed and power ups and food ext...
*the main game starts and there is a snake that is onexone grid unit and you use arrow keys to get moving
*it eats food and grows by x size.
*you get a score for how quickly and how many food you intake.
*i would like to add levels eventually so that there is obstacles

So it is very basic you have menues and you have a game screen where there are graphics and you control a snake.
High score gets saved to a file.

So how do I go about designing this on paper? I am treating this like a project to turn into a professor, except you guys are my professor.. :)

Thank you so much in advance.

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I have been watching tutorials on youtube to get good game design code. Here is a link that may help. Java Game Development Tutorials - YouTube

OK thanks. Ill check it out later. Does this guy show a way to play a project also? It seems most people skip this step, as they also do with planning in real life also haha.

BTW I am not interested that much in game development. I actually want to create a specific flash card application for my music stuff-personal use. But I know I can make a snake game so I wanted to start here.

Ok thats bucky. Yeah he is cool but he doesn't explain how to design a program on paper or charts or how to plan. I like him though.

My question is not a coding question... but more of a development planning phase question.

You want stuff you can see.
That's the basic rule.
So break it down into functional areas that you can do things with. Those are your tasks.
By "functional" I mean visible from the front, so buttons, screens, how things interact.
Some tasks will have dependencies on others, so that defines (to some extent) the order.

This allows you to see things advance, rather than simply writing a ton of backend code which gives you know visible app to show progress.

It also allows you to play with some of the stuff and so see if it works the way you imagined. It's easier to shift things around before you've stuck a load of other code on top of it, should you find something that doesn't flow as well as you'd thought it would.