Table Of Content
Before moving onto backgrounds, introductions, and key descriptions, start by putting your idea into a single, clear sentence. A game design document is a crucial part of game development — especially when you have lots of people working on different aspects of a game. Usually, initial drafts of the game design document are written by the team’s lead game designer, along with others on the design team. And while the lead designer will most often continue to be the “owner” of the document, they’re also responsible for gathering ideas and input from everyone else who’s involved in the game’s development. Mind maps and concept art would help you convey your ideas to your team members in a clear and precise way.
Who reads the GDD?
Game Design Documents (GDD) have a long history and a different place in many designers' toolboxes. Documentation is often seen as the most frustrating and tiresome aspect of game development but it doesn't need to be. When done right it can facilitate communication and collaboration within your team and become a testament to your hard work, a record of all your struggles and victories along the way.
Gameplay Mechanics
Even this basic design can show how an idea is supposed to work relatively effectively. While the one-page method does encourage you to present information in the most appropriate way, this is often a beneficial side effect of limiting your design to a single page. However, what you use doesn’t really matter, what’s important is that it’s a good fit for you and whoever you’re working with. However, there are a huge number of other services that provide similar functionality but in different structures and formats. For example, in the early stages of your project, you probably won’t know exactly how each mechanic is going to work or what everything will look like or what the name of the level 2 shopkeeper’s dog will be.
Various Formats for Game Design Documents
Ultimately what we (or any competing work-for-hire studio) need is to communicate the full vision of the game to our producers, software engineers, artists, and QA testers. Each member of the team needs to understand the aspect he or she is responsible for and be able to visualize the title in action before a single pixel is programmed on screen. Today, most game developers follow the agile approach to documentation. As Jim Highsmith, one of the 17 original signatories of the Agile Manifesto, said, "We embrace documentation, but not hundreds of pages of never-maintained and rarely-used tomes."
Decide the best way to explain your design
It oulines everything from the story to the game mechanics, and can even include your thoughts about art style, game economy, and more. Let's face it – documentation is usually seen as the least fun part of the game development process. "No one reads GDDs anyway." "They become outdated the minute you finish writing them." Hopefully, this article has helped you to think about how a game design document is, essentially, a communication tool for your ideas.
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If your game is light on story, a logline, rough synopsis, or brief outline of the plot will do very nicely here. "Game design docs are very alive documents," explained Rodolfo Rubens, a Nuclino user and indie game developer at York Game Studio. A great character feels like a natural part of your game's world, yet is unique and interesting with their own traits and personality. The character profile is a popular framework for developing unique characters. Game designers and writers use it to define a character's background, appearance, general strategy, and gameplay style. Or they could be centered around collecting references for characters or environments.
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Guerilla Games quest designer and Gravity Ghost lead Erin Robertson Swink has an older blog here on Game Developer detailing "alternatives" to GDDs that actually fit beautifully here in a mechanics section of a GDD. Designer and author Steve Swink also has an older blog resource specifically on mechanics design and game feel that's extremely useful for parsing specific language and communication around mechanics. If you are a solo developer, you may still find a GDD helpful as a reference for yourself (perhaps when you are mired in the "swamp" of the development process to go back and have an answer for "what was I thinking?").
Nuclino also comes with an AI-powered assistant called Sidekick that can help game designers with various aspects of the writing process. With Sidekick, you can generate ideas for characters and plot points, instantly generate descriptions and dialogue, get suggestions for more concise or engaging language, and much more. A game design document or “GDD” is the master document which lists all of the features, concepts and ideas which are supposed to gel together to create the final game experience. A game design document is the single point of reference for your video game project. This template using Milanote is a non-linear version that is online and infinite. The simple process of filling out this GDD template will help you start thinking through your game’s design.
Video game design document examples
Our accomplishments prove that having a comprehensive GDD is essential to any game’s success. To illustrate how vital the GDD is for game development, think of it as your project’s fortress. With a solid basis, your game will survive and successfully enter the market. We often say that the best documentation is that which is findable and up to date, and this is certainly true for GDDs. It’s really important to organize your docs, and regularly update them so everyone can find what they need.
This foundational blueprint offers more than just direction; it ensures projects stay on course, and creativity thrives within established parameters. It acts as a constant reference point and lays the foundation for future iterations. Thanks to the robust capabilities of Notion's platform, this meticulously designed template revolutionizes game development, delivering a comprehensive framework for achieving success.
Traditional GDDs – those lengthy, rigid Word documents, attempting to needlessly explain every detail of the game only to never be updated or read by anyone – are obsolete. As you can see above, many details may change from the initial pitch to the final experience. The goal of a feature document is to focus on a single aspect of the game. In fact, I think documentation and advanced planning are essential to communicate with your team members. Don’t get me wrong, traditional GDDs for older games are great for design insights (especially when the goals are the same), but you don’t need to use their template.
A crucial step in any game pre-production is deciding what the world or environment will be like. A world can be as expansive as a wide-open fantasy landscape, or as minimalistic as a single room. Here's where you let your imagination run wild and set the scene for your character and level design.
This is your chance to define the essence of your game, and provide a quick, clear understanding of what it’s all about. However, I’m not a game designer, and while I can show how you might like to keep track of your design, I would recommend some of the following expert resources for how to actually approach the design process itself. Staging your design document to match the phases of your game’s development can make writing your GDD more efficient. Instead, it can sometimes be better to use different length design documents at different stages of your project.
Game Design Documents can be thought of as the "blueprints" for putting together a game. First and foremost, they should very clearly communicate the designer's vision for a game, and do so in a way that is useful and readable for every team member or stakeholder, no matter their discipline. Treating it as a rigid blueprint kills creativity in the team and builds a wall between the ideas and their implementation. Being afraid of deleting and trimming content is just as bad and will lead to your GDD becoming so bloated and outdated that it's impossible to navigate. As your team debates approaches and iterates on game features, retire any docs that are too out of date to easily fix. It’s much better to make a brand-new doc whenever a feature changes radically.
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