The Writing Style..............................
Before we delve into which sections your design document should contain and what
areas it should cover, it is worth discussing the style you should employ when writing
your document. The design document is meant to be a reference tool and, as such, you
want to make it as easy for people to search and refer to as possible. A big part of this
will be maintaining a good Table of Contents, as we will discuss in a moment. In writing
the text of your document, you will want to break it up with lots of titles, headings,
subheadings, and so forth. This will make it easier for readers to skim over the docu-
ment and zoom in on the information they are seeking. Breaking your information into
lists, either numbered or bulleted, wherever possible will further allow readers to eas-
ily realize what different attributes a given part of the game will need to include. Some
find it more difficult to write in a bullet-point style, as it requires you to constantly shift
indentations around and bold-face titles instead of just including all your ideas in a sin-
gle narrative paragraph. You may find it easiest to write out your document first, and
then go back and format it properly. That way you get all the content down, and when
you go back to edit the document, you can simultaneously properly format it. Other
designers actually prefer writing in a bullet-point style from the start to keep their ideas
straight. Though writing in a bullet-point style may involve more hassle for you, the
end result is a more useful document for the members of your team. Furthermore, the
managers and executives will appreciate it, since it makes the document that much eas-
ier to skim.
Some designers use special writing tools for composing their document. These
might be applications better suited to writing text with lots of headings, subheadings,
bulleted lists, and so forth. These various applications may allow for the autoformatting
and indenting of text, which could save you a lot of the time you would spend in a regu-
lar word processor dragging around indentation markers and tab stops. That said, I have
never used such a tool, nor have I ever worked with someone who did. The primary
problem with these tools is that once your document is done, you will need to pass it
around electronically for everyone to read. Chances are slim everyone will have this
unique formatting tool. Instead they will have a regular word processor. The document
will be read by everyone from the other members of your development team to the peo-
ple in management to the executives at your publisher. You cannot expect all of these
people to have installed whatever eclectic design document authoring tool you have
chosen. If the tool you use provides an exporter to a standard word processor file format
such as Rich Text Format (.rtf), that will usually solve this problem, but make sure the
exporter actually exports a document that matches the one you have composed. Still, I
have always been quite content using standard word processors for my own needs, and
have not felt the need for a more capable tool.
Though there is a great temptation to do whatever is necessary to “bulk up” your
document in order to make it seem more thorough and complete, you want to avoid
repeating information as much as possible. This is challenging as you talk about an ele-
ment of gameplay that directly relies on another system you discussed ten pages back.
Instead of redescribing the system, refer your reader to the system’s original defini-
tion. This is important since, as you find yourself updating the document over the
course of the project’s development, you will need to change data in only one place
Chapter 19: The Design Document 357