Table Of Content
Along the way, Arion forms alliances with unique characters, unravels the history of the world, and ultimately confronts Malador in a climactic battle. A completely optional section, but write your ideas now so you don’t forget them later. It’s important to think about how you are going to market your game, even before starting your development. It’s also important to know where the money to make the game is coming from.
Technical Description
Discuss the color palette, character designs, environmental aesthetics, and any visual themes that will create a cohesive look for your game. If your team has game writers, you’ll probably want them to help you draft this section of the document based on their own story and character ideas. It’s not uncommon for this section to basically be a summary of a separate, story-focused document that the writers are busy creating as a supplement to the GDD. Next, define your game’s genre, and provide reference examples of similar games. This helps your team get a better sense of the game’s style, gameplay, and mechanics. Your genre of choice will also affect your team’s marketing efforts, once the game is done and ready to be marketed to an audience.
Game design document template
For example, if your game features combat mechanics, you’ll want to explain how players attack, defend, use special abilities, and manage resources like health and mana. It’s also essential to outline how the gameplay loop escalates as the player progresses through the game. Will new elements be introduced to maintain a sense of freshness and challenge? Will the difficulty curve gradually increase or feature spikes at certain points? Addressing these questions will help paint a clearer picture of the gameplay experience you’re aiming to create. A Project Status Report holds significant importance in the overall game development process by providing stakeholders with updates on the progress, milestones achieved, and any issues or risks encountered in the project.
How to Put Together The Feature Doc
How to write a Game Design Document in 2024 - Game Developer
How to write a Game Design Document in 2024.
Posted: Tue, 15 Aug 2023 07:00:00 GMT [source]
As the game development process became more agile, the approach to documentation evolved as well. Realizing that overly lengthy and rigid GDDs are difficult to maintain and are hardly ever read, most studios have moved away from traditional design documentation. Usually, initial drafts of the game design document are written by the team’s lead game designer, along with others on the design team. And while the lead designer will most often continue to be the “owner” of the document, they’re also responsible for gathering ideas and input from everyone else who’s involved in the game’s development. The first section of your game design document should provide a high-level overview of your idea.
It's a modern, simple, and blazingly fast way to collaborate, without the chaos of files and folders, context switching, or silos. We often say that the best documentation is that which is findable and up to date, and this is certainly true for GDDs. It’s really important to organize your docs, and regularly update them so everyone can find what they need. As you can see above, many details may change from the initial pitch to the final experience. Here is where you’ll want to link out to more compartmentalized parts of your documentation instead of adding more to the 10,000ft view master doc. Don’t get me wrong, traditional GDDs for older games are great for design insights (especially when the goals are the same), but you don’t need to use their template.
Level Design Specifications
However, ensure you’ve included all the significant details about the game. You’ll see a great design document example shortly to see what we mean. You must constantly update and adjust it, adding new relevant ideas and solutions. You’ll get to finalize it once you gather enough information about the game — it usually happens after pre-production. The agile management framework has changed the game dev industry and inspired many teams to implement shorter game design doc versions.
How do game developers use game design documents today?
It shouldn’t be a burden or a “chore.” It might not be the sexiest part of game design (we’re still not sure one exists), but it is a worthwhile endeavor (at least on paper). And there aren’t a landslide of last-minute changes to every part of the game–the game design document is the dam that’s supposed to hold back that flood. This saves a lot of effort and frustration at the end of the game’s life. The plot, the characters–everything matches the information specified in the document.
How to Write Your First Game Design Document
Even this basic design can show how an idea is supposed to work relatively effectively. While the one-page method does encourage you to present information in the most appropriate way, this is often a beneficial side effect of limiting your design to a single page. However, what you use doesn’t really matter, what’s important is that it’s a good fit for you and whoever you’re working with. However, there are a huge number of other services that provide similar functionality but in different structures and formats.
Step 5: if applicable, describe your game’s story
Exactly which format you should use for your design document depends on what you’re trying to show. One-page designs work well because, just like the builder’s blueprint, they allow you to communicate an entire idea on a single page. For example, if you’re trying to balance the stats of different weapons in your game then designing them all on one “weapon balance” page makes a lot of sense, as you’ll be able to see how they compare at a glance. Even if you’re working on your game on your own, the one-page approach can be an extremely useful design tool.
Brainstorming is a classic creative technique for generating new ideas quickly. You can use it to explore visual styles, dream up new characters, worlds, or even the levels you're planning. Documentation is often seen as the most frustrating and tiresome aspect of game development but it doesn't need to be. When done right it can facilitate communication and collaboration within your team and become a testament to your hard work, a record of all your struggles and victories along the way. While many of the older GDDs above were printed and kept as hard copies, modern docs are typically hosted online using a dedicated knowledge-sharing platform, like GitBook. You can also use other online tools, such as Google Docs, to create documents and share them with the rest of the team, although permission controls and search options are more limited.
For smaller games (think game jam entries or solo projects), a GDD might be less necessary or could just be a few simple pages. If you’re the only person on your project, you might have a clear enough vision in your head, even without extensive documentation to guide the development process. Still, even a simple GDD can help you stay organized, and keep a clear focus as you build 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. When you clearly outline the game’s mechanics, story, and visuals, it helps investors visualize the final product. We reached out to game designers and developers to weigh in on whether they use GDDs professionally or in their personal work. The most common advice was not to fall prey to any one format if it doesn't clearly communicate what you, the designer, are trying to.
One solution is to write a Game Design Document, which is typically a detailed guide that describes what your game is and how it will work. Or maybe you need to pitch your project in some way, to a publisher, as a part of a crowdfunding campaign, or as an early access project, and you need a way to show others what the game is going to be like when it’s finished. This might be because you’ve got plans and ideas for your project that you don’t want to forget.
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." If you have levels or "physical" areas (as opposed to more abstract play areas like the screens of Tetris), a rough map can be very useful here. At the outset, it doesn't need to be extremely detailed or ornate, but a visual representation of how locations relate to one another can help everyone on the team "see" the world.
These key concepts, or pillars, are driving forces which we use to help us select the best trade-offs for our unique vision when two equally viable paths present themselves. You should create all of your documentation with these goals in mind. You need to understand that in the end of the day, game design is a maker’s craft, which means studios want to see what you’ve made, so they understand how do you make your design decisions.
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