Digital Game Design Document - Writeup

This assignment is due on Friday 6/8.

Note: I will be expanding this specification with additional subjects to write about, excerpts from the book, and more industry GDD tips/examples.

Requirements

The design document is Phase 3 of the prototyping process. Refer to Chapter 14 in your book for details on Design Documents. It has a lot more guidance and details than writeup.

Looking at the outline on pages 396 through 399, and look at the rubric below to see what sections I will be checking for.

I realize that some sections will be small and others larger, depending on the scope and aspects of your games. Maybe your character section is really long, or maybe your game hardly has characters. I leave it up to you where you invest the majority of your detail. It’s fine to put medium detail in all sections, or a lot of detail and effort in the most relevant sections.

The Document

Your design document should be a living document. While I expect you to have a “complete” version for me to view on the due date, it in no way needs to be a “final” version. Later project milestones will ask you to make sure that your design document remains up-to-date.

If you to add something to the document that is not in the requirements or the books outline, please feel free to!

Wiki

I want everyone to use a wiki to write their document. Which wiki solution you use is up to you.

One of the easiest solutions is to create a GitHub, GitLab, or BitBucket repository - they all allow you to create and edit a wiki.

Examples

A few places you can find examples of Industry GDDs:

http://stemchallenge.org/resources/game-design-documents/
http://seriousgamesnet.eu/assets/view/238
Let me know if you find other good examples, especially from games you are interested in!

Deliverables

All I need is a link to your Game Design Document wiki emailed to me by one of your teammates. Make sure that it is readable by me!

You can send a link to me before your design document is complete for grading purposes - I will just make sure that the link is working.

Rubric

Points	Content
5	Design History In addition to the version history of your wiki, provide a section that outlines major changes/versions of your design document
5	Document organization Easy to navigate and find relevant parts
15	Vision Statement Have a vision statement, logline, and gameplay synopsis.
20	Gameplay Section I want to see everything described in this section, as appropriate.
10	Audience/Platform/Marketing Include Target Audience, Platform, and Feature Comparison. You don’t have to write Top Performers or Sales Expectations, unless you want to.
20	Characters, Story, and/or Game World Game Characters If characters are important to your game, this entire section is important. If your game makes very little use of characters, still write what you can. Story Same as for Characters, even if there is very little story in your game still write what you can in this section. Game World Same as Characters and Story.
15	All required sections/depth of detail Important aspects of your game are well described All required sections are present, unless not relevant to the game Specifically I want to see characters, story, game world as relevant
10	Media list Use this as an opportunity to start thinking about what blueprints and other assets you will create. If people have their own assets to work on, it will help avoid merge conflicts.