Good Tools & Methodologies for designing Game Arch

Question

I'm currently developing a multiplayer and turnbased silverlight card game and using WCF Polling Duplex communication. I've almost finished the game but I'm still dealing with the methods and animations during the game end. Sometimes I'm loosing control and can't even debug and leave it for days to get some more motivation.

What I'm asking is that there should be some methods to design the gameflow on papers such as GameState charts or similar. I did some by myself to track states of some objects but it didn't work out. There should be some tools or methods to do this.

Answer 1

Try doing some Test Driven Development (TDD) if you are having difficulty debugging something. Use concise methods that do one thing. Don't have large methods that act/do many things. Separation will allow you to test each method individually.

As for charting you could look at Message Sequence Charts to help organize the flow of your game:

Answer 2

What I'm asking is that there should be some methods to design the gameflow on papers such as GameState charts or similar. I did some by myself to track states of some objects but it didn't work out. There should be some tools or methods to do this.

You can use UML diagrams to plan out your ideas if you like. UML Sequence diagrams are good for communication (and look like Luis Estrada's picture) and UML State diagrams are often useful for modelling state changes in the program.

But there are no standard ways of using game states (and not every game even has discrete states like that) so there isn't really specific tooling for it.