Game Development Reference
In-Depth Information
The Game Design Document
When you begin to design your game, and the ideas are coming fast and furi-
ous, you'll need a method for tracking all the information. In addition, when you
work with a team on a game, you'll need a method for communicating informa-
tion to them about how the game needs to look and what will happen during
various parts of the gameplay. This is what the Game Design Document (GDD)
is for; it's the team's bible.
As you've seen in this chapter, level design is where you'll begin to map out
where events occur, starting points, spawning points, exit points, and so on, so
this is a good time to review the GDD.
In Chapter 3, “Core Game Design Concepts,” we looked at a general overview of the
GDD. As we noted there, the GDD contains specific details about the game's levels.
Bedlam Games, located in Toronto, Canada, and makers of the
Dungeons &
Dragons
games, works routinely with this kind of document. You'll find an
example of a GDD for
Red Harvest
in Appendix C. At Bedlam, many developers
contribute to the GDD but the central authority of the document is the game's
Creative Director, Zandro Chan.
In reviewing the excerpt, you'll notice that the GDD contains references to
audio, scripted dialogue, lore, and quests along with the amount of time esti-
mated to play the game. For the entire game, the designer's goal was to build a
product that would take at least 10 hours to play from beginning to end.
A GDD is a
luid
document. That means it's a repository of all the elements
that go into the game, including art, dialogue, audio, and so on; however, as a
game is being built, if certain aspects aren't working or need to be tweaked, you
do that through the GDD. Nothing written in it is cast in stone, and the GDD
can be altered at any time to reflect changes in design.
t
h e
e
s s e n t I a l s
a n d
B
e y o n d
A great deal of information has been presented in this chapter, but you should be starting
to understand how a game is designed and then put together. Substantial logic applies to
all the work done during the design process; this may seem incongruous for an art form
that relies on seemingly random events to make the gameplay fun.
a
d d I t I o n a l
e
x e r C I s e
Create your own level design. Keep it simple, and sketch out just one room from a top-
down point of view ( POV ). Pick one character who needs to be able to get out of the
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