Compared to a game proposal (being a very short and concise document used to present a game idea, as talked about by me in an earlier blog post), a games design document is incredibly long and detailed, and it's not unusual for a professional games design document used in the games industry to stretch over 500 pages long! A games design document can be considered as a 'bible' to your game, being developed during a game's pre-production stage (around the design area) before its creation begins. It's actually very important that everything in this document is readable and understandable to every single employee working in your game studio. A few game design documents, like the design document for ‘Multiplayer Pacman’, explain the information about the games in an incredibly technical level down to the game's base hardware platform, even though it's an incredibly simple game about eating dots which is designed to be accessible to a wide range of people (as talked about by (Hackett, 2007), who discussed how a design document should be completed in a meaningful way). The design document needs to reflect on the game's purpose, in this case be understandable for anyone who reads it, even if it’s a new developer whose specialism is 3d modelling that joined the team halfway through development, as they’ll need to get a good idea of what they’re doing. Because of this the document must be readable by anyone who isn't a highly skilled programmer (as it appears in the Pacman document), and while still being very detailed and evaluative, just in a more understandable tone. Otherwise this newly employed 3d modeller will have absolutely no idea on what they're supposed to be doing!
Producing a games design document in some shape or form can be critically important to the creation of every video game, and as researched from a published article by games journalist (Sayenko, 2015), many smaller indie game studios ponder whether or not it's even worth the time to create such a large document with so few members of staff, or whether or not it's worth just jotting down a few notes and ideas instead. This is especially true if a person's creating a game by themselves, if they have it all planned out inside their head, is it worth writing it all out into a physical format anyway? I, along with the source above, feel that it's always a good idea to write down as much information about your game as possible. A smaller team during development could have completely forgotten about a certain feature or mechanic in a game, and re-checking the GDD as a form of reference will constantly give them a strong idea about what sort of end-goal they're working towards throughout all stages of development. Likewise, if there are features which can't be put into the full-game before release for whatever reason, having these ideas written down that you can come back to in years to come could even be applied within a DLC update to your game (with the extra time and money earned from the game's sales), or even implemented into a sequel which improves and expands upon previous concept that maybe didn't initially work well. This is why it's so important to write about every aspect for your game, from an asset list of 3d models being used, a detailed analysis of your characters along with their abilities for balancing purposes, discussion on the incoreration of various games design techniques (like the ones I've researched in my blog) and even a section where you say where you sourced all of your game's assets from, it all comes down to future-proofing your work.
Something that a developer should note when creating a design document is that not everything listed in it is set in stone. Considering the design document is first created before game production even begins, there are naturally going to be elements of the game that come and go throughout the whole development process. The task of games development isn't just a linear pathway from start to finish as you make a game directly by the book, people think of new ideas as they go while also making other subtle changes to suit the situation. This is why there are normally multiple revisions of a games design document, and a 3rd revision could be made halfway through development which includes many new features in the game that weren't planned, while also omitting ideas that never fully came to fruition. That's the joy of games development and designing a document, you're applying your creative ideas to life and having a passion and love for your product is the best midset to have when creating a 50, or 500, page document about your game. To quote (Freeman, 1997) on the matter: "Some of the best parts of many projects were discovered in the heat of last-minute deadline panic. True, the pressures of time and cost budgeting don't allow for perpetual reiteration of concept, but you simply cannot expect a killer game to come out of dry, predictable work. The challenge is to create a design document that will allow your project to tolerate surprise adaptations without losing the integrity of its original direction and scope.".
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