Game Development Reference
In-Depth Information
Why Do We Need Documents?
Beginning game programmers often make the mistake of thinking up a game and
then diving in and starting to program it right away. In modern commercial game
development, however, this kind of ad hoc approach is disastrous. Different proj-
ects require different degrees of formality, but all serious game companies now
insist on having some kind of written documentation as design work progresses.
A key part of game design is transmitting the design to other members of the team.
In practice, a lot of that communication takes place not through the documents
themselves but during team meetings and conversations over lunch. That doesn't
mean that there's no point in writing design documents, however. The documents
record decisions made and agreed upon orally; they create a paper trail. More
important, the process of writing a document turns a vague idea into an explicit
plan. Even if no one reads it at all, an idea written down is a decision made, a con-
clusion reached. If a feature of a game is not described in writing, there's a good
chance that it has been overlooked and that someone will have to make it up on
the fly—or, worse, that each part of the team will have a different idea of what they
intended to do. It's far easier and cheaper to correct a design error before writing
any code or creating any artwork. Depending on the size of the game, wise devel-
opers allot anywhere from one to six months for pure design work before starting
on development, usually in combination with some throwaway prototype for test-
ing gameplay ideas.
Types of Design Documents
This section is a short introduction to the various types of documents a game
designer might create: the high concept, game treatment, character design, world
design, and story or level progression documents, as well as the flowboard and the
game script. Each of these is defined in the following sections. This isn't an exhaus-
tive list, nor does every project need all of the items on the list. Rather, these are
some of the most common ones.
The high concept and game treatment documents are sales tools, designed to help
communicate the game concept to a funding agency such as a publisher. They are
usually written in a word processor such as Microsoft Word and distributed in
paper form. The other documents used to be written in a word processor as well,
but it is increasingly common in the game industry to create them as pages on an
internal company website or wiki. As long as you can keep the website secure, it's a
good way of documenting a game design so that all the members of the team can
access it, and you can update it easily. Once the wiki software is installed on the
company server, the whole team can edit the content using only a browser. Be sure
you have revision control and backups so that you can revert to a previous edition
if someone deletes a page by accident.
You can find samples (or pointers to samples) of design documents on the topic's
companion website at
www.peachpit.com/fgd2.
