[casual_games] Res: Game design document

[Nic Cusworth]

Those slides are excellent, and see - doing this for 14 years and still
learning. 'User stories'. Really like that idea and will try doing that in
my next GDD.

Thanks for sending that link. They useful!

Nic.

P.S. His Power Point template is horrible :)

-----Original Message-----
From: casual_games-bounces at igda.org [mailto:casual_games-bounces at igda.org]
On Behalf Of Adam Martin
Sent: 21 March 2007 12:45
To: IGDA Casual Games SIG Mailing List
Subject: Re: [casual_games] Res: Game design document

On 20/03/07, oscar oscar <oscar.oscar.oscar at gmail.com> wrote:

> Will NO ONE sacrifice one of their actual, completed design docs? ^_^

>

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

> >

> http://www.gamasutra.com/features/20060516/carless_01.shtml

> >


http://www.gamasutra.com/features/19991019/ryan_pfv.htm is what I
point people to when they want to know how to get going with their
design docs, and/or when they've submitted stuff to me that is just
not good enough as a commercial pitch.

My general advice is to write a concept first, ideally 2-3 pages, as
per the article, and then expand that into a small GDD (no more than
20-30 pages max - I prefer around 10-15 for smaller games) and
eventually a large GDD (non-casual games generally need something
which is > 75 pages, in some cases >> 75 pages ).

I would also strongly advise people to read the slides from Damion's
game-design-docs talk at GDC a couple of weeks ago :

http://www.zenofdesign.com/Writing_Great_Design_Docs.ppt

As has been pointed out, just arbitrarily giving out design docs is
not generally allowed. However, I feel strongly that it's also not
that useful, if you have a rough template (like in Ryan's article):
IME if you cannot follow a basic standard template and organize your
own thoughts well enough to create your own sets of sub-headings
appropriate to each major heading, then you probably aren't ready to
write a design doc yet. Either you need to think more about your game,
or learn generally how to compose your ideas into clearer forms.

YMMV, of course.

Adam
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