Game Design Documents

This week's topic will be about Game Design Documents. Game Design Documents, or GDDs for short, is essentially the game's bible. It can be physical or digital and it details every aspect of the game to the point where if anyone had a single question about the game, no matter how big or small it may be, there will be a section in the GDD that you can point them to. This would mean that the bigger the game, the thicker the document and most people don't want to go through hundreds of pages of text (be it physical or digital).

Now, I obviously can't speak for all studios. Everyone has their own way to deal with GDDs. But I feel that the bigger the studio, the bigger the document. My reasoning is that the designer(s) probably won't have time to answer everyone's questions personally or guide them in the right direction. So usually, they create a detailed enough document that they can simply give to the person for them to understand what they need to do.

Anyway, there are a few things I recommend doing or avoiding when it comes to GDDs.
 
Visual Aid
Pictures, pictures and more pictures. The more visual aid you use when describing something, the better. Because when you describe something using words, other people can misunderstand what you're saying. So it's best to use pictures as much as possible. I'll give you an example. I once created a document for a character I designed for an action, role-playing game. When it came to designing its attack animations, I photographed myself performing the actions to roughly show what it should look like to the animators.

1 of 6 attack animations

Blocking

Short and Sweet
Unless you really have to, use as few words as possible. No one likes reading walls of text, especially when they're not broken down into smaller paragraphs. This is especially true for most programmers and artists. So always be concise with your descriptions and explanations. You can also consider using bullet-points so it looks like a to-do list to whomever is working on that particular feature of the game. It will make their life easier.

Degrees of Separation
What I like to do with design documents is split them up into smaller documents. I feel that there is no need in putting everything into a single document, be it digital or physical. I have 3 reasons behind this.

First, is that some parts of the document are irrelevant to certain people. For example, programmers will care about how the battle system work, but not on what a character visually looks like or what the dialogue of certain NPCs say. So just split your document into smaller categories rather than forcing someone to have to go through a lot of irrelevant information just to get to the section that they only care about.

Second, I feel that your document becomes more organized and easier to manage. When you need to know about a character, simply grab the characters document. If you want to know about how the user interface works, grab the user interface document. It also makes updating the document more efficient because while you're updating one section, people still have access to other sections. If you're doing a physical document, you only need to print out the updated document, rather than re-printing out the entire document just because you updated one section.

Third, and this is highly unlikely, if you somehow ruined one document (like file corruption or something like that), you'll only be affecting that document while sparing the rest. Like they say, don't put all your eggs into one basket.

Well that's it for this week. Thanks for reading and see you all next week!