My artifact, the Game Design Document

So in this new course we’re making another game and will be writing one of several artifacts that you’ve been working with. You should answer the questions what/how/why? and basically reflect on what you’ve worked with. It has to be 400 words minimum and deadlines are on thursdays and on top of that one member of another group will comment your blog post with at least 200 words. Anyway enough talk already let’s get started!

So what have I done and what have I provided to my team? Well I picked the role as the group’s game design document writer, meaning that I have the outmost responsibility to make sure everything’s okay and to write the game design docuement. But why me? Well it was pretty straightforward, to make a game you need coders and artists. Every group has at least three coders and three artists but not everyone can start with it in the beginning. You need someone who can handle the design part and thus are required to see the details and being very structural with things. And in my group I’m probably the least experienced coder which means in this case that I’m not gonna provide as much to the coders as I would do with writing reports. So I pretty much took that role since it is in that area that I can be the most effective in. This does not mean that I’m the leader or bring up all those ideas or have the final word, but instead I’m the one who, as said, should document everything down so that the group can refer there to further understand the game’s concept and such. Of course everyone has the responsibility to make sure it’s correct and I usually bring this topic up a lot to my group so that everyone agrees and have the same goal. It is important to discuss those things regurarly with your group. So what I’ve been doing is, before going straight to the “report structure” (writing a more professional and formal language) of the game design document, I instead answered the questions inside out. Our teacher gave us a “formula” on how to write the game design document with all the questions in bullet points, and me and my group sat together and discussed those questions. When most of the questions got answered, only THEN did I begin on writing the “real” GDD. Yeah it turned out great since you have something to base upon but I’ll be taking it next time as my second artifact. Down below is the front-side of my more informal GDD that I made pretty early with the help of my group’s support in answering those questions that is! But oh my it’s terrible and with so little content but I’m glad it has evolved to something much better at least. But let’s save that for another time.