I thought I knew what I was doing last year. My plan had been to write up the text of the game, then simply make a _few_ revisions based on the playtesting. I thought that my design _must_ have been advanced enough that I could commission art. I expected that I could finish off playtesting in 6-9 months, max and have my book in public Beta by early 2012.
I have learned a great deal over the last year. I tore out 50% of the system and abandoned the text which I _had_ been writing. I changed my approach and decided that I really needed to get the core system solidified before I tried anything else. This led to me creating and heavily revising of a 2-page rules summary, just so that I had something to work from.
This is almost all I had ready by the time the convention season began. Each playtest taught me a different lesson. CanGames taught me that the game itself had the potential to be fun and compelling. The Grand Roludothon taught me to simplify the mechanics and adopt a more improvisational style. GenCon gave me 2-3 pages worth of astounding feedback which I am only now starting to digest.
Now I am organizing all of the rules for the Spark RPG. I have Google Docs open and I am populating it with a series of one-line statements. Each statement corresponds to an individual rule, concept, explanation or piece of advice for the game. When I finish that up, I will be able to organize the content and turn that into a solid outline for my next attempt at writing the rule. My hope is that through outlining, I ought to be able to write the game in the most concise manner possible without losing clarity.
Are there any readers in the audience who outline this way? If not, how do you organize your RPG content?