Game Documentation Guide - Professional Techniques for Video Game Writing - page 26

4
Game Documentation Guide
John Feil
4.1 It Lives!
Game documentation is fundamental to the process of actually making games. This
is the document that puts the plan into action, that gives the developers focus, that
outlines what the game is and how the developers are going to bring it about.
The sad thing about game documentation, however, is that once everybody agrees
that it represents the game everybody ought to be building, it becomes obsolete al-
most immediately.
Game development is a chaotic process and, like water, tends to seek out the earth
that is easiest to carve. Sometimes, the earth sends the water in unforeseen directions.
In game development, sometimes ideas that seemed so simple are suddenly revealed
to be enormously complex. The amount of art you wanted in the game, once looked
at closely, is projected to take months of extra time and millions of dollars more in
extra cost. Characters are revealed to be cliche, game mechanics shown to be less
than fun.
The great German strategist Moltke the Elder once said, “No battle plan survives
contact with the enemy.� The same goes for game documentation. Once the rubber
hits the road, everything changes.
Thus, if you want your game documentation to survive, it must live! It has to
be agile, to be able to change when it needs to change. It needs to be strong, so
itcanconvincepeopletothinktwicebeforethrowingitasidefortheideaofthe
moment. It has to be charismatic, so it can sway people to believe in its vision.
Otherwise, it will start gathering dust the minute the dev team writes its first line
of code.
Currently, there are a few ways to make sure your game document lives. Ev-
erything depends on someone being responsible for it: someone needs to keep the
document updated and current so that the developers on the team can refer to it with
the confidence that it is accurate.