Much has been written over the past few years about the game industry and design documents. In postmortems, you can read how some went right and others went wrong. In game design books you can find samples of design documents, advice on how to write them, and templates to help you get started. But for many small-time game developers, those who work alone or in small teams, design docs are often ignored.
For some games, it’s perfectly fine to skip the design documentation phase and dive right in to the code. Games with simple mechanics are easier to tweak and adjust during development. Some games may actually benefit from such a process. But as Jay Barnson points out, some games are too complex to keep all of the design details in your head. Thoughts tend to wander and get scattered about, so the more information you need to keep track of for your design the harder it is to keep it all together. What’s even worse is when you only have a vague idea of what the final product will look like, with few details mapped out on how to get there. For many projects, there comes a time when you really ought to commit something to one form of text or another, else you’re setting yourself up for failure.
I agree with Jay that a design doc need not be a bunch of prose. If you aren’t trying to pitch the game to publishers, nor trying to create a unified vision for a large team of developers, then just stick to the facts, ma’am. An outline of game progression, mock-ups of GUI layouts, charts and tables, statistics, formulas… anything that can help you keep your thoughts cohesive and stay focused. If creating a detailed backstory helps you get there, then don’t hesitate to do so. But you don’t need to worry about selling points or flowery adjectives when you have an audience of one.
One of the important aspects of creating design documents is that you ought to be comfortable with the medium you choose. I’m much more at ease with a pencil and notebook than I am with a word processor. In all of the years I’ve been using computers, I’ve rarely touched any word processing software unless I absolutely had no choice (a job I had over a decade ago did require frequent use of WordPerfect). I’m so inexperienced with office software that it takes me forever and a day to format a single page (and forget about presentations or spreadsheets). The moral of the story is that every time I’ve tried to digitize my design documents with a word processor, I didn’t get very much out of them. And plain text files are too limited to be useful.
Recently, when I had an idea I wanted to start documenting, it struck me that there is a medium that suits me much better than word processors: Wiki. Until recently, I had never had occasion to use any Wiki software as an editor. But while I was involved in writing a few pages of documentation for an open source project, I had a reason to learn it. Since I do have a local server set up, I decided to install a Wiki and use it for my design documents. I downloaded MediaWiki. It installed without a hitch and I got busy. I’m quite happy with the result. All of the design documents I put together will be easily accessible through one page, with cross-referenced sections hyper linked. This makes navigation quite easy. And formatting is much simpler than when using plain HTML (something else I had attempted before).
If you’re like me and word processors just don’t do it for you, you may want to consider using Wiki software to document your designs. Even if you don’t have a LAN set up at home, or don’t us a Linux distro (which all usually come preinstalled with a LAMP stack), you can still get set up easily. Download WAMP, set it up on localhost, install MediaWiki (or an alternative) and off you go.
Anyway, you should never underestimate the importance of design documents. Diving right into the code is always a huge temptation, but you really ought to avoid it and get as many of your design goals as possible into text for all but the simplest game concepts.
Technorati Tags: game design, design documents, Wiki, game development
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