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If you’re going to outsource your game’s development, you only need to write the title, elevator pitch, and your desired budget and timetable. A document containing only the project overview is sometimes called a Game Concept Paper and it’s enough to fire up a project. That said GDD is a document that is tailored to any specific project’s needs, and they may be a lot different compared to each other. Some games have several pages of design documents that describe everything down to its minute detail.
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This page is particularly important as it establishes the game’s identity and sets the tone for the rest of the document. This section provides a comprehensive guide for integrating the level and guarantees alignment with the game’s narrative and visual design. The characters and settings in the story section should exhibit depth and clarity, supported by detailed information that contributes to the game’s storyline and their significance within the game world. If you have levels or "physical" areas (as opposed to more abstract play areas like the screens of Tetris), a rough map can be very useful here.
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Provide short descriptions of their backgrounds, motivations, and roles in the story. Flesh out the game world by describing the game’s setting, key locations, history, and lore. Your GDD will also be read by stakeholders — people who aren’t on the dev team, but care about the project’s success. Stakeholders include people like marketing managers, investors, advisors, publishers, and other groups involved with supporting and selling the game. After thinking about all this you may feel you really need to prototype and try some ideas out before you can figure out your larger vision. While some folks are excellent writers and can convey detail in a crisp manner, most folks tend to ramble on when trying to get into the weeds and they wind up creating a bramble of ambiguous thorniness.
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When you picture a game design document, you might imagine a written file, such as a word document or a Google doc, that sets out all of your game’s design details in one, or more, pages. Typically, a game design document that is this detailed would act as a point of reference for how everything works in the game, what each level should look like and which controls the player will use to actually play it. A game design document that’s marketing focussed might include information that a potential investor or publisher might want to know before considering your project for investment. The idea is that a basic one-sheet game design document can be used to quickly communicate what your game is about in a concise way, and it’s typically what you’d give to anyone involved in the early stages of your project.
A design document video game typically includes an executive summary covering the game concept, genre, target audience, and project scope, as well as sections on gameplay, mechanics, and more. This helps to provide a comprehensive overview of the game’s structure and elements. A game design document, often referred to as a GDD, is a detailed internal document that covers a number of aspects of a video game’s design and development. The primary goal is to explain the core vision of the project, as well as setting the scope and laying out guidelines that the team can refer back to throughout development. A game design document is made up of multiple, detailed sections and when your head is filled with ideas it's easy to get lost in it.
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Design Document: Play With Fire.
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However — and I cannot emphasize this enough — the most valuable part of writing docs is the chance to boil down all of your wild ideas into the essential parts you need to actually START the game development process. Even though GDDs are among the critical components in the game development cycle, their role might have shifted slightly over the years. The thing is, information stored in a game design document can be redundant unless well-formatted. It’s important to remember that lots of people from many different disciplines may refer to a GDD — from artists and level designers, to engineers, composers and even the marketing team.
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In the same way that reading a dictionary is different to learning a language, separating the different parts of your game’s design can make it difficult to understand how it’s supposed to work as a whole. Compared to a written design document, a wiki is useful in that it’s easy to access, easy to update and provides information in smaller, bite-sized chunks. So it’s little surprise that many people have moved away from large written documents in favour of design processes that are more flexible.
It’s a living document, so your first draft doesn’t have to be great — just get started, and you can refine it over time as you have more ideas. Nuclino can serve as a lightweight game documentation tool, a game development planner, an internal wiki, and more. You can create real-time collaborative docs, allowing you to document, share, and collaborate on anything, from game proposals and storyboards to character profiles and concept art. But it doesn't mean that game design documentation has become obsolete – it has merely evolved. When thinking of a game design document, you might picture a giant 100-page word file, neatly organised into sections with links to chapters on marketing, mechanics, characters and the game’s story. These tools are just a starting point for the development process, ensuring a solid foundation for the final product.
If your game is a specific genre, or a hybrid of genres, lay it out clearly. Whether you're working alone or on a team, having thoughts exist in hard-copy formats outside of our individual heads is useful. People forget things all the time, and when you're working on something as complex as a game, it's always best to have a backup copy of information, plans, and more. Creators of Social Games in which a group of players form a micro-community where members play together as a tribe to accomplish goals. We want to bid on your game, of course, and we hope going with us is a no-brainer once you see our value proposition. But you're free to pass the document to other places for competing bids, as well.
The sound section of a GDD should delineate the game’s musical style and any specific themes or motifs that need to be incorporated. Detailed notes and sketches are essential to establish the identities and roles of the characters in the game. A character web that illustrates their relationships could be included in cases involving multiple characters. Visual representations are crucial in conveying the characters’ personalities and interactions within the game. Not every game has characters—but if your game does, it's useful to have notes and sketches here for who they are and how they'll feature in the project.
If you ask any professional game dev team, they’ll all tell you that a well-groomed game doc is among the key factors that help create a stunning product. Of course, not every game has a huge development team — some titles are created entirely by solo developers. But even a solo developer may find a GDD useful, as a later reference point for decisions they took early in the process, or in case they bring in a second developer to help share the work. Because as you saw with the professional GDD examples, very few games end up looking just the way they were described in the first draft design. Next, describe the various objectives players will encounter within each level. These could be things like puzzles, combat encounters, or collectibles.
A project that already has a degree of interest from potential customers is likely to be a more attractive proposition than an untested concept and your GDD can be used to show that. A publisher or an investor of any kind may have similar questions about your project, what they feel they can bring to it and how much of a risk it’s likely to be for them. And, when considering if I can invest my time into the project or not, I usually have the same questions about what the project is like or if I think it’s going to be successful. While I’m not an expert on investing in a project, as a games composer I have occassionally been offered royalty-share opportunities in return for working on a game in the past. Instead, it can help to focus on the most important elements of the game that you want to get across without worrying too much about the detail.
However, you will probably have a working title, you’ll know what the gameplay or the story might involve and you’ll know what your design pillars, the cornerstones of how your game feels to play, will be. As a result, you may want to use your GDD to explain who the product will be for, how it will make money, how well other games you’ve made have done and importantly, what level of social interest this project is already getting. It might also include a couple of the game’s main mechanics or controls, so that someone could easily understand what the game is going to be like to play.
Visual aids will also allow you to keep your ideas structured as your GDD grows and accumulates details. Use the graph view in Nuclino to get an instant visual overview of the whole game design document with all of its interconnected elements clustered by topic. In the early days of video games, GDDs would typically be huge physical documents, often hundreds of pages long and covered in scribbled notes from producers, developers and designers. As technology evolved, and bigger-budget games meant larger teams and agile work environments, video game design documents have become more flexible. Traditionally, GDDs have been detailed, 100+ page documents, which tried to explain every detail of the game up front. As the game development process became more agile, the approach to documentation evolved as well.
Now that your Game Design Document is complete you (and your team) have a fully fleshed-out plan for your game. Remember, creativity and inspiration are constantly evolving so come back and add to it when inspiration strikes. Finally, mention the platforms your game will be available on, since that will of course influence both technical and design considerations. That said, with a good HL-GDD we can at least get to work scoping out the real cost of your title.
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