[casual_games] Game design document

[allen.partridge at iup.edu]

There’s a good overview in the Rollings and Morris “Game Architecture and
Design” as well. I know that off and on there are good examples online too.
One of the problems is that just like in film, ther really isn’t a single
standard. For me these have evolved based on the needs of the game and
honestly the most useful ones have spent the bulk of their life on a yellow
notepad. ;)

 

I think it helps to go from concept to rules to game logic (program
architecture) – but I’ve heard people argue effectively that it should start
with experiments on features and then move to design standards etc. I read a
nice article not long ago on the process used by Reflexive to create Wik –
but I can’t recall the source. Perhaps someone else recalls.

 

--al

 

-----Original Message-----
From: casual_games-bounces at igda.org [mailto:casual_games-bounces at igda.org]
On Behalf Of Juan Gril
Sent: Tuesday, March 20, 2007 10:00 AM
To: IGDA Casual Games SIG Mailing List
Subject: Re: [casual_games] Game design document

 

I started to write GDDs based on Chris Taylor's and Ernest Adams' templates,
but after a while I came up with my own style, which fits better our
development style. I start with the treatment, which becomes the How To Play
section, and then I start adding sections as follows: 

- Introduction: the introduction from the treatment.
- How To Play: the rest of the treatment. All elements of the core gameplay
go here, so this section is heavily modified with a lot of specs added
throughout the process. 
- User Interface: all GUI specs go here.
- Sounds: Initially I was listing all sounds here, but now this is only a
description of the overall goal for sounds and music, and we use a separate
spreadsheet for every sound and its description. 
- "Additional Assets": Depending on the game, the title of this section may
differ, or won't exist.
- Developer Notes: a section where the developers write anything they want.
It's their own scratchpad for the project. 
- Feedback from Publisher: I was using this section to paste the feedback
from the publisher of every build, and have a list of pending issues. But
I'm phasing it out, as I moved it to a spreadsheet in the timeline. 

I don't do level design on the GDD. I use spreadsheets for it.

I hope this helps. I just realized that the GDD question is popping up
fairly often, so I added in my wish list of topics for the Casual Games
White Paper to expand a Documentation section with a GDD and timelines
example (for timelines, I guess we can use what I presented in Amsterdam
last month). 

Cheers,

Juan



On 3/20/07, Jose Marin <jose_marin2 at yahoo.com.br> wrote:

Hi!

Do you know any good sample of a Casual Game Design Document?

There are some on Gamasutra and Gamedev, but I would like to see some made
for casual games...

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