Table Of Content
People who do not invest resources on good documentation at the start of a development cycle often land in a myriad of confusion when things begin going a bit astray. The article helps in understanding importance of game design document and share a template for developing your own game design document. Entire courses of study can be taken on user experience/user interface design specifically for games.
Technical specifications
Today, most game developers follow the agile approach to documentation. As Jim Highsmith, one of the 17 original signatories of the Agile Manifesto, said, "We embrace documentation, but not hundreds of pages of never-maintained and rarely-used tomes." In the Art and Sound section, you’ll detail the visual and audio style of your game. It’s common for this section to include references from other games, movies, and other artwork for inspiration. Discuss the color palette, character designs, environmental aesthetics, and any visual themes that will create a cohesive look for your game. Your GDD can also be used as a sales tool, because it helps potential partners understand what’s unique about your game and evaluate its market potential.
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It helps in establishing firm, well-thought game mechanics to bring about a successful gameplay experience. We consulted with a number of talented game designers to gather the best practices for writing and maintaining a modern documentation. If you make sure your GDD is easily searchable, readable, and concise, it will be an incredibly valuable resource for you and your team. When you picture a game design document, you might imagine a written file, such as a word document or a Google doc, that sets out all of your game’s design details in one, or more, pages. Typically, a game design document that is this detailed would act as a point of reference for how everything works in the game, what each level should look like and which controls the player will use to actually play it. Or at least they don’t use the kind of large single-document design guides that you might imagine when picturing the traditional game design document.
Snap Finger's Joanna Haslam on why GDD is better - Pocket Gamer.Biz
Snap Finger's Joanna Haslam on why GDD is better.
Posted: Tue, 21 Jan 2020 08:00:00 GMT [source]
Project description
GDD helps all of your game art outsourcing studio members stay on the same track and collaborate efficiently. Onboarding new team members becomes a piece of the pie with a first-class Game Design Document. It will also allow you to set accurate deadlines and budget limits. The game’s soundtrack is composed by [Composer’s Name], aiming to create an immersive experience with a mix of epic orchestral and atmospheric pieces. This article describes some different GDD formats and goes into detail about how to write a one-page GDD, an idea put forth by Stone Librande in a GDC talk about Diablo III.
Why Do We Use GDDs?
If someone else can easily understand your game by reading your GDD then, even if you’re working alone, your design document will be much easier to work with and much more helpful to you as you build your project. When you write your game design document, it can help to think about why you actually need one in the first place. Pick and choose what is important for your game and what works for your team. If the GDD is getting too long or complex, you can create several smaller documents that focus on specific areas and link to them from your GDD. Mechanics detail how the player will interact with your game, and how the game will respond. Progression explains how players will advance through the game and how that adds to the player experience.
This should not be a detailed technical description, for that you have the Technical Design Document (TDD). There are complete books and sites with materials about how to describe game mechanics, so we’ll not elaborate with examples here. Having introduced the characters, it’s a good time to talk about the events that will happen throughout the game. The reason we start with characters is because you need to introduce them before the Story. If your game doesn’t have Characters and/or Story, you can just jump to the Gameplay section and remove Sections 1 to 3 (or leave them empty). Featured Blog | This community-written post highlights the best of what the game industry has to offer.
Nuclino: Your team's collective brain
In this exploration of GDDs, we’ll delve into what they are, what should be included, who writes and reads them, their significance in game development, and when they are necessary. We’ll also examine real-life GDD examples to gain insights into how this critical document shapes the gaming world. To create a design document, you should prepare distinct sections, consider access requirements, and provide visual examples.
Game design document template
Include information about monetization strategy and how that does or does not tie in with the larger marketing efforts. If your game is light on story then you can leave this section out or give a brief overview of the overall plot of the game. If your game is more narrative-driven you’ll want to give a synopsis and outline of the overall story that highlights key plot points. You can also discuss branching strategies and what level of impact the player will have on the story. The game overview section is a place to provide a high-level overview of the game, essentially an extension of the original pitch.
The more complex your game is, the higher the chances that your project and timelines can “go off the rails” if you haven’t planned well enough. GDD helps in documenting and clearly defining expected game functionalities Since game development is a creative process, it requires more effective communication channels to deliver the concept to various team members. You'd also be correct in assuming tools like Miro are practically perfect for outlining/charting/creating diagrams for illustrating gameplay mechanics and systems. You can even use visual features like boxes and bubbles in a program like Google Docs to rough out a clear diagram—there's no need to be fancy, so long as it is immediately readable to the reader/viewer.
However — and I cannot emphasize this enough — the most valuable part of writing docs is the chance to boil down all of your wild ideas into the essential parts you need to actually START the game development process. In the modern era, most of your work in game design won’t be in the game design doc. Usually, the framework is set up early and then left in place with only lead game designers making changes to them. Your instinct might be to leap directly into a massive game design document, but please don’t waste your time and energy yet.
Designers or artists may find ways to resolve bugs that require less time and effort than an outright bug fix. Putting the Bug Report in the GDD will increase the chance that your teammates see the changes noted there as they look for instructions making their next asset or feature. Keep your feature docs as short as possible while providing enough clarity to get you started on those first steps.
If you need to revert back to something, you have the text trail to see where things went wrong and what you can do to restore an earlier idea. Keep the changes updated in the document–you might want to put everything you replace at the end of the document. Instead, you can describe the types of cars, the environments, how things blow up, what “things” blow up. Use technical, descriptive language to describe elements of the game in detail.
In my studio work, living docs and wikis are paramount, and the classic "here's just a literal document that tells you what the game is" is very outdated at this point. I think a good doc also needs to have [the game's] core pillars very rigidly defined [in] explainers for folks to reference too, so devs are on the same page about what they're building." As with the game world section, some reference or concept art goes a long way here. Even if it is just rough and ready, visuals can give a sense of who these people are, how they go about their lives and how they relate to one another over the course of the game's events. In platformers like Super Mario Bros, running and jumping are core mechanics.
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