While we designers have not had that much to do apart from making design decisions, there has been one thing that we can always fall back to, the game design document (GDD). While I am waiting for the feature freeze to come into effect so that I can start seriously working on the level design I have been writing the GDD. The reason I am waiting for the feature freeze before putting more effort into the level design is that it is easier to balance the level when you have every asset and their respective statistics. Writing and updating the GDD is something that will always happen when there are more features added to the game but what can be written has been written during these first few weeks.

The template that I had received from Adam Mayes was quite extensive and included a lot of details that I felt were not necessary for our little project.
I kept the entirety of section one since that is the most important, in my opinion.
Section two felt a bit unnecessary since we had clear instruction on what tool we were supposed to make the game in and we simply do not know enough about the details of software and hardware requirements to write anything about that, so it got removed.
Most of section three has already been written in the Product initiation document or group contract by the project manager and I therefore thought it was unnecessary to write it twice and removed that part from the document as well.

While the GDD is not a 100% necessity since we have the product backlog and the user stories, I felt like having a document were things are written in a flowing text might help with making it easier to read and find specific details.
Considering the size of the project the GDD is not too big either since there are not a lot of things to write about. I also use this as an “excuse” to get practise writing GDDs, since that will probably be in my job description in the future.

About Daniel Reinsson

2017 Game Design

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