Often these documents spend a lot of time, maybe half their pages, talking about
back-story. Usually this back-story is very weak and poorly developed and is only tan-
gentially related to the game being developed. The Wafer-Thin Document also spends a
lot of time talking about how the menus will work. Not the in-game menus, but the sys-
tem menus where users select what type of game they want to play, set their options,
and so forth. Many mock-ups are made and options are carefully listed. What exactly
the options will affect in the game is seldom described in any detail, since the game
itself is barely defined. Figuring out the menu system is something best pursued once
the game is working, when the designer knows what sort of options might be important
and what different gameplay choices players will have; it is certainly far from the most
difficult part of game design, nor the most important system to nail down first.
Wafer-Thin Documents are often constructed by managers who like to think they
are game designers. The reason these can also be called Ellipsis Special Documents is
that they are often littered with ellipses. For example, the worlds players will encoun-
ter in the game will be described in the following manner: “Jungle Worldis a very hot
and sticky place where the Garguflax Monkeys swing around and torment the
player...” Andthat will be all the document provides in way of description for the
world, ending at an ellipsis, as if to say “insert game design here.” It is unclear whether
the writers of these documents plan to come back and fill in at the ellipsis later or that
perhaps they do not deem it worthy of their valuable time to actually explain how their
game works. They just assume someone somewhere will fill it in and make them look
good.
Another example of the content found in Ellipsis Special Documents might be:
“Players will be given an option of many cool weapons. For example, the Gargantuan
Kaboom does twice the damage of the players’ other weapons and has a special effect.
The Barboon Harpoon will allow users to kill enemies at a distance with a nice camera
effect. Other weapons will be just as fun and cool...” Here thewriter of the Ellipsis
Special fails to describe the weapons the game will have to any useful level of detail, and
then, having listed two weapons, decides to leave the rest up to the imagination of the
reader. Of course, readers are very usefully told that the other weapons will be “fun and
cool.” The writers of the Ellipsis Special mistakenly think that is all the description
necessary to develop a game.
The only upside to the Wafer-Thin or Ellipsis Special Document is that it allows
whoever gets to implement the design to pretty much take over the project and turn it
into her own. I say this is an advantage, since usually the ideas the manager included in
the Wafer-Thin Document are beyond ridiculous and do not make for viable gameplay.
But one must be wary. Problems arise when the manager shows up six months later and
complains: “But that’s not what I wrote!”
The Back-Story Tome..........................
Unlike writers of Ellipsis Special Documents, the designer who writes the Back-Story
Tome spends a lot of time working on her document. These books (it is hard to call
them merely documents) usually stretch into the hundreds of pages — 300-, 400-, even
500-page documents are not out of the question. There’s a lot of information in there.
The first mistake these documents make is usually a poor table of contents and the
lack of an index. In a design document, well-ordered information and a good table of
Chapter 19: The Design Document 375