The goal of the document is to really capture the who, what, when, where, why and how of gameplay.
It needs a real sense of your entire game from the document alone.
a lead designer with input from art and engineering, as well.
a title page or a table of contents.
where did a game come from? What is it's history?
What was it's inspiration? What sort of started your interest in this particular game.
give an overview. You want people to be excited about your game design.
a real sense of the overarching game world and the things that they would find in it.
You want to write and talk about the game mechanics and the underlying systems.
the different elements that go into a game.
What are the different categories of things that you would find in a game?
And so if you need to trim some so that you can actually implement your game, that's gonna happen in this design document.
What's the story of the game?
Does your game have levels,
or is it an open world?
Because many games introduce mechanics not all at once to a player.
They don't just throw them in. They introduce them one at a time.
It's not introduced in the first level of the game, it's introduced later.
So does your game progress? Are there levels? Are there different locations?
Are different worlds within a game?
Beyond that are there menus?
Are there debug systems?
Are there modding systems?
Does your game contain things like artificial intelligence?
So that, again, you can control for scope, you can think about what features are the most important,
These are the things that are probably going to help you the most. And truthfully, being easy to update.
So you have content management systems, wikis.
Project management tools like Basecamp, Trello, are free for most purposes.
And I do want to say that you know the truth is, we all kind of play the same games, and look at the same things, and are drinking what I tend to refer to as the same designed Kool-Aid.
How do I collaborate? How do I build things and how do I get better at design?
Just because you documented, doesn't mean the game is finished.
OTHER IMPORTANT DOCUMENTS (NOT TO BE IN THE GAME DESIGN DOCUMENT)
So, I think another important thing to talk about is there are lots of other kinds of documents that you're going to create along the way, and they're just as important as your design document.
Specifics about writing code.
A marketing document.
How you're gonna break down your teams, or who's gonna manage what, or who's gonna lead.
The traits, where somebody's coming from, what's driving them.
And if you have voice over acting, or things like that, your scripts.
An Art Bible
Storyboards particularly for sequenced events.
technical design document.
Things like QA Reports, QA reports. Quality assurance reports,
Schedules,
Production planning,
Business,
Marketing documents that go along with a game.