Game Documentation Guide - Professional Techniques for Video Game Writing - page 31

Mockups, Maps, and Areas
Another thing that the game treatment document should include is a good amount
of accompanying pictures. These can be hand-drawn concepts or fully rendered
3D models. There should be maps of significant areas, sketches of environments,
anything that can help bring your game concept to life.
However, don't throw the kitchen sink in the treatment. Only include the best
art you can. Stay away from including anything that looks like it was hand-drawn
on notebook paper by a non-artist and scanned into the computer. Once again, the
treatment is still trying to convince people to make your game. It should look as
professional and as polished as possible.
Other things you should include in the treatment are control maps: pictures of
the controllers for the targeted consoles shown with identifiers showing what each
button does. This gives the reader a visual idea of how the game will be controlled
and shows that you are already thinking ahead to how the mechanics of the game
really work.

4.5 The Full Game Document
Once the treatment of the game has been given the thumbs up, you can now move
on to the full game document. Usually, these are several documents that are made to
guide each section of the team in their duties to create the game. Following are some
examples of the types of documents the team will need to create for this purpose.

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The game design document, which includes the story of the game, along with
game mechanics and systems, a list of assets that need to be built, such as player
characters, nonplayer characters, levels, objects, units, weapons, etc., the user
interface (UI) and heads-up display (HUD), and the game dialog script.

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The art bible, which is the style guide showing the artists concept art and
reference they should be using to guide the creation of objects within the game.

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The technical design document, which lays out how the game will be pro-
grammed and lays down rules on how programmers should comment their
work, which libraries they should use, what language the game will be written
in, etc.

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Other assorted documents, such as the scheduling doc, which the producers
create to illustrate schedules and show milestones, a testing plan that Quality
Assurance follows to thoroughly test the game, and others.

The Game Design Document
The game design document (GDD) is the central document all stakeholders refer to
so they know what the game is all about. It talks about the story, all the characters,
and all the areas and levels. It goes in depth about gameplay and mechanics. In short,