One-page document
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Hello, I am Hampus Bergström, the game designer for the team Wendigo that works on the game Umibōzu. For the last few weeks I have created and updated a one-page document for the team. The document contains explanations and images of every feature and asset in the main game mode of the game that is currently implemented in our development build or are soon to be implemented. As we progressed further into development I noticed that not everyone could keep up with the current design of the game. Many mechanics was changed or redesigned from scratch from sprint to sprint, not always big changes but still important changes. I tried to keep an organized and clear design document that everyone in the team could access but it contained to much information, it was hard for everyone in the team to get a quick overview of where we were when it came to design. Nearly every meeting I had to explain some part of the design to someone in the team, this happened more often with the artist. Probably because they didn’t have a working build of the game when I decided to create the one-page document due to problems with Unity collaborate. To fix this problem created this one-page document that I now try to update as quickly as possible after each sprint plan meeting and send it out to everyone in the team. This one-page document was completely made from scratch and I didn’t use anything from the one-page that we got with the concept document for the game as that doesn’t represent our current design The one-page have helped us as a team as we now all are on the same page when it comes to the design of the game and with this clear overview of the game it has also helped us see and solved some problems with the overall design. The biggest change we did thanks to the one-page document was probably the design of the HUD in the game. In the first image there is just placeholder art of what the final design might look like and the second image shows what we ended up with. We noticed that the battery bar (blue bar) was way too small when you had it in-game, so we made it larger and we also noticed that the power-up/inventory bar should probably be closer to the middle of the screen as it was hard to keep track of what power-ups you had and at the same time look out for enemies around the boat. These things we would probably have noticed anyways but thanks to this one-page document people noticed it much quicker and it’s easier to see flaws in your general design if you have this overview and take a step back and look at. I would recommend that every team try to use a one-page document during development.  |