Re: World building
Totally agree Dark.
To the genre thing: yeah, there are a bunch of unclassifiable games out there. I only meant to give examples. If you read "Save the Cat" by Blake Snider, he has a whole chapter on non-traditional genre writing. As far as that question goes, it doesn't matter what you define your project as as long as it makes sense to you.
Though I think your example of Final Fantasy would fall under steampunk if I'm not mistaken. But, like I said, it only has to make sense to the project developer. It's only to keep them in a frame of mind--not to provide publishing material. If someone wants to call their project a "farmer goes dragon slaying adventure," I don't see anything wrong with that.
Also, I never meant for all the questions to be answered. Obviously there a bunch of questions dealing with the rest of a world that would have no baring on a project that only exists in one city. Many questions are context dependent. That should be obvious.
I tried to put the questions in a certain order so that if one was answered one way than other questions below it would be clearly not applicable.
It should be pretty clear how much a project needs to be developed. If you need things to think about for how much you want to define your world then these questions are collected here. People who don't need detail aren't obligated to some or any of these questions. I'm just trying to give people things to think about. And if you're developing an RPG, or other deep story type projects, then world building is often critical to a good story--not always but often.
Not all these things will even come up in the game. I think Lucas did more world building than you realize behind the scenes. It's not always about what's said directly in a story or glimpsed in the background, but world building helps any storyteller ground their story in a believable world rather the end user gets to see all the dials, switches, and sticky notes that went into the project or not.
Brandon Sanderson has boxes of notes and notbooks filled with esoteric details on his Cosmeer that the reader will never even know about through his stories--same with George Martin, Tolkien, Herbert, and a ton of others.
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