Game development week 4, Design Document writing.

During the week i have been writing the design document for the game i am working on. In the start of the week the design document was containing around 800 words and a lot of unneeded material. During most of my monday i spent reading trough the Design document and commented on what was in need of cleaning and rephrasing. Throughout the rest of the week i have been reading others design document from earlier project to understand the structure of the document, how they formulate each section and the general feel of the document.

the design document in its purest form is the team’s go to guide for how stuff will work in the game. For example
there is a section called States in the design document, the section explains every state in the game such as Start menu, game, options, pause, game over and winning state. Even if i think every state is really self explanatory they needed to be written down. All state still needs an explination of what they contain such as buttons that leads to other states. Not that i am not writing the code for the states, i am simply explaining how the states is going to work with each other.

This picture explains the connection between each game state and modes. How the program can change between the different states and what state it can change to with the current active state. For example when the program is initialized you can either go in to the option mode to change settings or start the game; from Game state you can enter the pause state or you may activate the Game over/winning state, from both Pause state and Game Over/winning state you can enter start state again.

With the design document as a whole artifact i think my work could have been a lot more effective, to start writing the design document this week may have been a mistake. During the earlier weeks of production this document may have saved us a lot of time. in sens that everytime we discuss something and how it’s going to be, when that is decided it should be documented into the design document, that way whenever the production never needs to take the same decision twice. i’m as the designer is going to try and update the design document from now forward at least once a week. I believe that a updated design document is really healthy.

Over and Out Adam.
P.s there has been some problem with people unable to comment on the post. Hit me up with a private message or similar and i shall try to sort it out.