Appendix B Sample Design Document:The Suffering........

Appendix B Sample Design Document:The Suffering..........

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nlike the previous appendix, in this section I have included the design docu-
ment for a published game that shipped in early 2004: The Suffering.
Developed at Surreal Software and published by Midway, the game endeav-
ored to explore the horror genre but apply a significantly more action-oriented
experience to it. I was lead designer and writer on the project, meaning it was my
responsibility to create and maintain the design document. The document has been
included here in an unedited and unpolished form, “warts and all” as it were. This is
exactly the version of the document used during development. As I stated in Chapter
19, “The Design Document,” it is not actually that important that your design docu-
ment be written with flowery verbiage or perfect grammar, as long as it conveys the
information you need to get across.
For space reasons, this document was edited down from its original form, which
was just about twice as long as what you see here. Most of what has been removed are
the specifics of various game-world entities (weapons and NPCs) as well as a lot of the
Gameflow section, which described specific environments on a room-by-room basis.
These details were all specific toThe Suffering, and are repeated in other examples you
will find still in the document. I have tried to maintain the overall structure of the docu-
ment, however, leaving in all the major section headings. Whenever you see “[...]” you
will know that something was cut from the document at a particular location in order to
allow it to fit in this book.
It is interesting to notice what information is not included in the document that
probably should have been. The main area in whichThe Sufferinginnovated was
through in-game storytelling techniques, and, strangely, many of these unique tech-
niques are not covered in this document. Our morality/reputation system was also one
of our biggest points of differentiation, but the mechanics of how it works are not dis-
cussed in this document. Also, we amped up the horror components of the game quite a
bit midway through development, though those changes never made it into the docu-
ment either. Finally, we did a lot of work on enhancing the behavior of the creatures, but
none of that data was added to this document. For each of these changes and refine-
ments to the game, new documents were drawn up, but they were never incorporated

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