why is it important to document Your Game Design?

Document your game design so that you and any other stakeholders in the game (the team, management, etc.) know in as much detail as they need what the game is, what is needed to complete it, and why it’s worth building.

Your design documentation serves as the embodiment of the vision for the game shared by the team. It’s also be a roadmap and guide for during development. This documentation covers the qualities of the player’s experience, how the game behaves to support that, the reasons why you made various decisions along the way, and how exactly the game should be implemented to fulfill the design.

Note that all this is necessary even if you are alone on the project: six months from now it will be very easy to forget why you wanted something a certain way. Having to re-think it later can lead you to poor decisions or design thrashing (where you bounce between two lousy options instead of finding an effective one).

In other words, your design documentation is both backward-looking and forward-looking: it records the decisions you made and their rationales, and provides a map and a guide for developing the game going forward.

Next: Guidelines to follow