[casual_games] Res: Game design document

[Adam Martin]

On 21/03/07, Allen R Partridge <allen.partridge at iup.edu> wrote:

> I'm curious about how people handle the transition between the

> conceptual / marketing aspects and the actual implementation of the

> game. IOW, to what extent do you attempt to design architecture,

> feature implementation etc. into the GDD?


This is the purpose of the TDD (Technical Design Doc).

GDD defines the game, TDD defines the implementation approach.

TDD is what coders use as the authoritative declaration of what they
have to do and how in order for their code to be considered "correct".
GDD's generally have lots of room for interpretation and ambiguity in
precisely how much of a thing there is, how fast it is, how it works,
etc - and the TDD instantiates that into a level of precision such
that any two implementations from the TDD should be almost identical
in output (although actual implemetnation behind the scenes will often
differ, but only in non-essential aspects).

At least, that's the way it's been on most projects I've worked on.
There is no "law" for this stuff, just general practices (not always
the same everywhere :)).


> Do folks generally pass a feature list on to the programming team and

> then leave that up to them, or is architecture generally designed as


You should have experienced architects converting the GDD into a TDD.
In small startups, it's often the CTO. In small games companies, it's
often the lead programmer. In bigger companies, it's shared between
"technical designer", "lead programmer", "system architect", and all
the other team-leads (rendering, AI, physics, networking, etc from
code, and likewise the art leads, and the design leads e.g.
level-design lead etc) - usually by taking the GDD section-by-section
and getting whichever subset of the above people is appropriate for
that section and converting it into part of the TDD. Some people (e.g.
techincal designers, lead programmer) tend to be involved in every
section. Most people are only there for one or two.

Adam