Game Design

F or some years, while I was still an aspiring professional designer, I wanted some- one to tell me what the official format for ...

The Writing Style.............................. Before we delve into which sections your design document should contain and what ...

instead of several. Often, if the same gameplay mechanism is described in detail in more than one place, when it comes time to m ...

fully explain your system, even if it is “just like the mechanic found inSuper Mario 64.” A comparison to a popular game can pro ...

Table of Contents............................. The reader may laugh to think that I list this as an important part of the docume ...

Before writing the design document, you should have worked on defining your game’s focus, as I explored in Chapter 5, “Focus.” T ...

actual list of the different weapons found in the game-world until later in the document. The specific weapons represent instanc ...

platform-independent and allows you to change which keys do what later, without mak- ing you change a lot of instances of “the U ...

Having started with the basics, you can proceed to the players’ more complex actions, trying to logically structure the document ...

player-surrogate, Rynn, through the world using forward and backward keys, while the mouse turns the character. However, when pl ...

The in-game graphical user interface (GUI) is of critical importance to your game, and therefore it should be described in detai ...

Some design document authors may prefer to include the Artificial Intelligence section in the Game Mechanics section, but I pref ...

player decide to build more units, and how many will it make? Will the AI pick up on and defend against different attack types p ...

Game Elements: Characters, Items, and Objects/Mechanisms .... If you think of the level designers on your team as painters, then ...

combination of characters and items) detailing all of the different units that the players or their adversaries can control, alo ...

behavior of the AI or weapons and balance them properly. Statistics that you come up with in preproduction, where you have no re ...

breakdown will be best done by level. For each level, you should describe in detail what challenges players will face, what stor ...

Also, from each wave to the next, the conditions under which certain enemies appear change. For instance, the flea never comes o ...

strategy game likeRise of Nations. What the games accomplish and the experiences they provide are too radically different from e ...

Often these documents spend a lot of time, maybe half their pages, talking about back-story. Usually this back-story is very wea ...