Soon I am done with the Document

This week I have been working on the design document. It is going well and I have put down all my time to it. It will soon be done and my fellow team mates can look at it and give me some response. I have been dealing with the games details. Things that make a game work. A design document is a little like a rulebook. If you follow the document every part of the game from coding to art will be easier to do. Everyone in the team will be on the same page.

This week I wrote about Player, N.P.C’s, player resources, game hazards, critical points, environment and starting with game flow today. Writing the design document I used document we got from Adam Mayes, It had some great guidelines to follow. Some sections of the document we got were a little confusing. I think some of points in document were almost the same. Like some of the play mechanics I also wrote same thing in player resources. It says that I should go into detail of the game interface and how it works. And our health bar and ammo bar is a part of that, but is also a resource that fills up by you having to wait for it to fill up. I guess I could go into more detail but it is not that complicated how it works. Most of what is in the guide template is great and I will probably use it again in other projects I will do.

I also used a design document from a game called Captain Claw. It is one of my favorite games. It has some great ways use a design document. For example how it shows each of its enemies and item. They make these tables, looking like this.

1.1.1.1     Level 14—Chameleon

Logic:

Image Set:

Description:

The chameleon will fade in and out of the background, making him a very difficult enemy to kill.  This is the same enemy that’s used in level 13.

I use these now because they make every enemy so easy to explain. It is also easy for the coders and artist to see what part they need to work on, the now how many frames each animation needs,  how much damage an enemy does, how much health and so on. And it looks nice too.

The Claw document has really helped me and inspired me to make a document.