Table Of Content
GDDs can be presented in traditional written documents or game design wikis, depending on the project’s requirements and team preferences. Both formats offer their own advantages, catering to different needs and work styles. The mechanics overview in a GDD encompasses the fundamental gameplay elements, providing detailed information on the controls, player interactions, and unique gameplay experiences that players will encounter. This overview offers a concise summary of the game’s essence, while refraining from delving into intricate specifics of game mechanics. You'd also be correct in assuming tools like Miro are practically perfect for outlining/charting/creating diagrams for illustrating gameplay mechanics and systems. You can even use visual features like boxes and bubbles in a program like Google Docs to rough out a clear diagram—there's no need to be fancy, so long as it is immediately readable to the reader/viewer.
How to write a game design document (with examples)
However, with sufficient planning and thoughtfulness, you can make your game accessible to the nearly half billion gamers with disabilities in the world today. In short, however, you'll want to know how big the genre-specific and platform-specific audience for your game is. You can estimate this by looking at the copies of comparable titles sold, and can infer a bit more by looking at the size of online communities for comparable games. You'll also want to consider how to reach those people, whether it's by in-person events, social media, the building of a newsletter, or other methods.
Game Design Document Step-by-Step Guide (with free Notion template)
Finally, if you have any ideas that you're not sure about, but would like to prototype, then this is the place for that stuff as well. It doesn’t matter if you’re the game designer or the character modeler. Even if you’re not going to write it yourself, you should know how to use GDD properly. The lead game designer typically writes the initial drafts of the GDD. In a GDD’s story section, it’s recommended to sketch out the game’s plot, characters, and settings. These tools offer streamlined organization within a development team, improved accessibility and comprehension for novice designers, and the rapid capture and sharing of ideas.
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The final two sections are where most design docs explode in both complexity and length. Not only is it a terrible idea, modern tools allow us to outline and communicate far more effectively than a single doc ever would. These can provide a handy starting point when thinking about character or level design. Think about different parts of your game, animation styles you could use, characters, or even the history of your topic.
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This section is critical for programmers and other designers to understand how the game should feel and function. So you’ll need to put a lot of thought into it, explore how similar mechanics work in other games, and write it all down as detailed as possible. If your team has game writers, you’ll probably want them to help you draft this section of the document based on their own story and character ideas. It’s not uncommon for this section to basically be a summary of a separate, story-focused document that the writers are busy creating as a supplement to the GDD. Your GDD can also be used as a sales tool, because it helps potential partners understand what’s unique about your game and evaluate its market potential. When you clearly outline the game’s mechanics, story, and visuals, it helps investors visualize the final product.
Estimated Budget and General Timeline
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The key rule here is to trust your team and allow them to unleash their full potential. Now that you understand the necessity of a GDD to ensure your project’s success, let’s find out how to write a game design document. It’s also important to add more than just details for the design and development teams. A GDD should include information about the intended audience, gameplay, characters, story, user interface, and more. Remember that anyone — from artists to marketers — may refer to this when working on the game. Depending on the scope of your game development project, your design document may end up being very brief or fairly long and complex.
How to write a game design document
Whatever specific form your GDD takes, it should effectively, efficiently communicate your design and the core features you (or you and your team) will need to build. Rosa is a Lead Game Designer and far more capable TikTok skater than I ever will be. Her template has helped numerous designers get started with their ideas. In the template linked at the end of this guide, I've included "starter considerations" for each of those 5 accessibility categories. These can be considered a starting point in assessing your game's level of accessibility, and can help point you in the right direction when considering how to make your game more accessible. Planning a Go To Market (GTM) is also critically important, even for free games.
However, it may not be possible to design your entire game on one page. However, if you’re trying to choose what kinds of attacks should be available to the player and how they will trigger them then a “Combat controls” page could work for that. It can be a specific problem or it can be a broad problem, but try to make it one thing, not several, by giving it a primary focus. For example, let’s say that you want to understand how the combat system is going to work in your game.
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Generally speaking, the decision to use a game design document or not depends on how you like to work. However, there’s no set standard for what a game design document should be, what it should look like or what it should actually do. Whether you even need a game design document or not can be a surprisingly divisive issue. This final section is a bit of an amalgam of everything that didn't fit in the sections before hand. It's an appendix of all of the things that you didn't think were necessarily core to the game, but you'd like to consider along the way. It's also for alternate possibilities - for instance, if you had two main characters in mind, put the better one in the main document, and then the alternate here.
It is utilized when the game concept becomes too complex to be mentally retained and when there is a need to communicate intricate aspects of the game to others effectively. A simple example here is to create a chart showing a menu screen, intro screen, the HUD during a level of play, and an ending screen. Mechanics can broadly be defined as the ways players interact with the world and systems of the game, and the way those systems give feedback or react to the player's actions. This should be a brief introduction to the project itself, often with a very clear vision statement outlining the high-level pitch for the game and what makes it special.
Or, you could add a rough timeline with some milestones that you’re hoping to hit during development. Or, if the narrative of the game is important, this is where you might outline the basic story. Some people love them, while some developers claim that they don’t use them at all and haven’t for some time now. When you’re making your game there’s a good chance that, at some point, you’re going to need to write down how it works. Featured Blog | This community-written post highlights the best of what the game industry has to offer.
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