As a Game Design major, I've read up on a lot of resources regarding game design, and it seems to me that the "correct" process for a project is to flesh out everything on paper first (characters, levels, etc). When I wrote creatively, I was always encouraged to do an outline, character sheet, etc, however, I always found my creative flow worked a lot better if I just put pen to paper and brain dumped, then just edited the work.

For those of you that have actually published (or just finished for that matter) a game project, what is your process? Do you follow the "correct" metric, or do you just start slinging code? Thank you for any input. :)