Problem Breakdown

I've noticed that with the increased complexity next-generation games that
my old ways of breaking down gameplay features and turning that into a
technical design seem to be lacking, or at least far more difficult than it
used to be.  When searching, most of the results are perhaps too low-level
in recommending various C++ "patterns", general OOP principles, etc. or too
high-level like Rational Rose stuff, UML use-case diagrams etc.

My question is, given a problem (or feature to be implemented) what
methodolgies or techniques have proven useful to break down the problem and
detemine how to technically solve it?

The best example I have at the moment is implementing the AI for our current
game.  The are so many ways to look at the problem: I could break it down
into state machines, messaging, use-case, etc.  But each one while excelling
at some portion of the solution, also has a number of problems.  Also, it
involves an awful lot of people with different skill sets: who will do the
level AI markup? Path generation? Behavior specification? Rules? Animation
control? AI debugging method? Scripting integration?

So you have a problem that slices across the company in terms of
departments/pipeline (horizontal), and also one is multi-layered (vertical)
in terms of features like goal determination, planning, path-finding,
steering, animation state, etc. that could be split up by members within a
team.

Is it common to look at _all_ ways to solve a complicated problem before
determining a solution?  Or do most people just pick a solution that gets
them going and refactor later? Or?

Thanks.



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