I’m in the process of making a few different design documents at the moment, so that our iPhone development team can have some options to choose from.

After writing a couple of docs, I’ve massaged my design document “template” into something that really works for me, and I think works better than the traditional formats for independent game development.

The documentation style you get taught in university and at game companies tends to have a large focus on target audiences, marketability and “selling the project” to whoever is reading it, as opposed to describing the project and laying it out in a more objective and easy to read manner.

The pitch approach is great for when you’re making something primarily to sell it – however, in the case of indie game development, often your goal first and foremost is to make something good that you can be proud of, and saleability/popularity, while still desirable, is not the highest priority. You don’t want to be filling your informative design documents with it.

After stripping that stuff out, and adding a couple of sections that are more important to focus on early for smaller development groups, I came up with the following layout. The blue sections are only for story-driven games. For games that are purely gameplay without a narrative, they can either be left out or replaced with a very brief thematic summary.

Intro

1 paragraph description of the game. Describe your game in as few words as possible, as if you only had seven seconds to explain it to somebody. Attempt to capture the feel of the game – general enthusiasm (“This is a fantastic and exciting 3D platforming game!”) is less valuable than text written in-theme, such as:

The dame’s gone missing, and, just like always, you’re to blame. Now you’ve gotta beat your way through an undead horde before she’s sacrificed to Zombie Jesus… and you didn’t even get to eat breakfast. The Battle for Zombie Breakfast is a horror/noir 2D side-scrolling beat-em-up starring Isaiah Stakes.

Character bios

1-2 paragraph description of each of the major characters. Mention in particular how they figure into the game itself, and the way the player will perceive them initially vs. once they get to know them.

Rough plot

4-6 paragraphs. With as little backstory as possible, describe the game from start to finish. Include a rough breakdown of what is cutscene, what is gameplay, etc. With each part of the plot, it should be obvious how it will be presented in the game itself.

Gameplay description

1-2 paragraphs describing each distinct mode of gameplay, starting with core gameplay. For instance, Half Life 2 would first describe general running around and shooting, then twists on the core gameplay (such as the gravity gun), then vehicle sequences.

Artistic style outline

2-3 paragraphs describing the artistic style and feel. Cover actual in-game art, UI and menus and sound. Mocked up screenshots are preferred, if not, reference art.

Systematic breakdown of components

A rough outline of what systems will be required (for example, ones that will show up on most lists: 2D and/or 3D renderer, state machine, save/load system, UI system, collision system, particle system, etc). Include special features that, while they may not have their own system, will still need to be accounted for when creating systems (ie. day/night cycles, sound affecting gameplay, etc). If you will be using an API/SDK for a system, note it down – you’ll still have to do some work learning/integrating the foreign system.

Asset breakdown

Similar to the System Breakdown, but for visual assets, text and sound.

• Art Assets: List each major area of artwork (Player, Enemies, Worlds, UI/Menus, HUD, Effects), specifying roughly how detailed animations and states will be, and however much you know at this point about the pipeline/programs used.
• Text Assets: Identify major areas (tutorial, tips, scripted dialogue/quests, dynamically presented dialogue, narration), and attempt to gauge the amount of effort required on each section.
• Sound Assets: Similarly, the major areas (In-game sound, UI/HUD feedback sound, music, voice) should be detailed and described.

Suggested Game Flow Diagram

The intent of this section is to lay out, step by step, what the player experiences from as soon as they turn on the game until the end. While this can be generic and use a lot of loops (ie. Start Game -> Cutscene -> Tutorial -> loop(Cutscene -> Level -> Results Screen) -> End), it’s probably a good idea to attempt to envisage how your game might be able to break up the monotony that is evident in that design.

The great thing about this section is it gets you really thinking about what your game is and how it is presented, as opposed to the amalgam of disjointed ideas in your head. The deeper you get into this Game Flow Diagram, the more confident you will be about what your game is precisely made up of, and what the experience of playing it will be.

Suggested Project Timeline

Here’s where we get to the part where hearts break and tempers are lost – laying out a rough schedule for the game’s development that utilizes the breakdowns that were made earlier in the document. Schedule aggressively, but be realistic – you’re probably not going to get all of your menus in and working in a day. You don’t have to be specific about where and when – the most important information to end up with here is the number of man hours per team member required, and exactly who will be responsible for what.

Additional Ideas and Possibilities

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. 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.

That’s it! Design Documents made in this layout can be anywhere from High Concept length (2-3 pages) to full GDDs (anywhere between 5-50 pages). And finally, a few general bits of advice:

• Be thorough, but don’t be absolute. Remember that everything must be allowed to change and evolve over the course of the project, and the design document is a general description more than a blueprint. If you end up with a totally different game to the one that you laid out in the design document, as long as it’s better it doesn’t really matter.
• Don’t be hesitant to name check other games; it’s often the best way to get across a point to yourself/your team members. That said, don’t make that all your document is. (“The wit of Grim Fandango meets COD4-quality FPS meets LBP user-creation” sounds great, but doesn’t explain what you’re doing or how you’re going to do it.)
• Write well. Just because this is for your team’s personal use doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t try to make it as readable and expressive as possible – remember, this is the document that you’ll be looking back on during development to try to recapture the feelings and ideas you had about the project in the first place.

HTH, HAND!

It’s been a little while since my last entry, whose soapbox flavour has irritated me every time I’ve glanced over it since it was posted.

In any case, Stuff[tm] has been happening while the blog went dark. After feeling like I’d hit a bit of a barrier with the Thief and the Nobleman project I decided to work on something less experimental – something that I can actually make and release.

I’ve begun work on the bare bones of an iPhone game, and am discussing possible projects with a few people I know. It’s cliche, I know, and I honestly don’t feel entirely validated with the decision to move to the burgeoning indie platform… regardless, it’s exciting, and at least for the next few months I can probably get my artist friends excited about it too.

There are multiple avenues open at the moment, particularly with 3.0 introducing paid DLC. Without divulging too much, the project that’s most on my mind as of late is an interactive short story. In any case, I’ll endeavour to keep this page a bit more up to date with the developments (courting artists, planning the project, production) of this… er… endeavour.

We live in interesting times!

First, a brief preface: this deals primarily with games that have stories, and the developers who work on them.

Before I explain what I mean, we’ll conduct a survey to see whether you’ve felt the effect of this problem.

Do you ever feel like you’re creating a system (Lib or Game side) for something that has been done before in other games?

Have you rewritten similar systems multiple times for different games?

Do you ignore your writer out of necessity, because you’re having enough trouble making your systems as robust (and bug free) as possible to bother with their special requests or to spend a significant amount of your time with them – in order to realise the story as best as possible?

Do you feel like the systems you create are never utilized at (or even near to) their fullest potential?

Do you often feel, at the end of creating a game, that you’ve just scratched the surface of what you could have achieved? That the game always ends up being somehow less than the sum of its parts?

Now, the title above is a bit of an exaggeration. Your medium does exist. You created it, before – and, more dangerously, while – you were working your current game. And when this game is finished, the next game that you make will no doubt modify your medium so that it’s not quite the same as before, and the lessons you may have learned the last time around will have to be learned all over again.

It is important to understand the extent to which you have created your own medium – this can be done by drawing a parallel to the medium of film.

You see, you haven’t just created your own camera with its own special tricks and render modes. You’ve created your own movie theatre, which isn’t like any other in the world.

In this movie theatre the people who visit have to learn how to sit in your special seats and learn how to watch your special screen. You have your own unique, distracting doodads that pop up during the movie (but are necessary to pull the viewers with short attention spans, of course) and you have spent fewer hours on perfecting your story and methods of storytelling than you’ve spent making sure your seats are the most comfortable in town.

When the viewer leaves your movie theatre and goes to another, it is most likely so wildly different to your own that they have to learn it all anew.

This analogy falls down if you take it further – what is the equivalent for something not story-based, like Geometry Wars? A movie theatre that’s somehow also a playground? But even that illustrates the absurdity of indentifying any narrative-focused game and playground-like game as within the same overarching, all-encompassing medium of “Games.”

We are not story tellers, not yet. We don’t have the time, and cannot afford the focus.

We are inventors – and that will always be an element of who we are as game developers, and of the work that we do. But it won’t be until we quit our ridiculous race for the nicest chairs and the flashiest screens that we’ll be able to concentrate our efforts on taking what we already have and spend our time utilising that relatively static medium to its fullest potential.

I suppose it may be time for the roughly inaugural games I’ve played this (last) year post. Expect this to get a lot of edits as I remember games that I played last year, and possibly even re-rank them…

I believe the way this goes is, the ones I’ve completed are in bold, the ones I plan to finish are in italics, and they are sorted alphabetically by platform. Here we go!

Wii

• Mario Galaxy
• Mario Kart Wii
• Super Smash Bros. Brawl
• Wii Fit

Yeah, so my Wii is kinda collecting dust… and I still have barely touched Mario Galaxy. I’m a horrible person!

DS

• Cooking Guide: Can’t Decide What To Eat?
• The Legend of Zelda: Phantom Hourglass
• The New Super Mario Brothers
• Polarium
• Professor Layton and the Curious Village
• Tetris DS
• Time Hollow
• Trace Memory
• Trauma Centre: Under the Knife
• The World Ends With You

Pretty decent DS list this year. I should note that the entirety of The New Super Mario Brothers was played co-op (passing back and forth) with my girlfriend. Pretty fun!

360

• Assassin’s Creed
• Bionic Commando: Rearmed
• Braid
• Burnout Paradise
• Call of Duty 4
• Castle Crashers
• Eternal Sonata
• Fallout 3
• Farcry 2
• GTA IV
• Guitar Hero III
• Hexic HD
• Mortal Kombat vs. DC Universe
• Oblivion
• Rock Band
• Soul Calibur IV
• Super Streetfighter II: Turbo HD Remix
• Too Human
• Undertow
• Viva Piñata: Trouble In Paradise

Wow. I do a lot of gaming on 360. I guess ’07′s list was only for the quarter of the year that I actually had a 360, but still… wow. I did second playthroughs of Bioshock and Mass Effect in ’08 as well, but this list was already long enough.

PS3

• LittleBigPlanet
• Metal Gear Solid 4
• Valkyria Chronicles

Yay, PS3 debut! As you may be able to tell, I got this (for myself) for Christmas, which is why nothing’s actually finished. Valkyria Chronicles is the game I come home to at the moment though, and it’s amazing!

PC

• Beyond Good and Evil
• Civilization IV
• Left 4 Dead
• The Marriage 
• Quake 4
• Team Fortress 2
• World of Warcraft

The PC list will probably be the one most edited, as I remember games I’ve played at LAN-type environments, and little downloadable games.

Alright, now for the breakdown of my personal top 5 games that I played in 2008 (probably the second most edited list)!

5. GTA IV 

4. Trace Memory 

3. Fallout 3

2. Left 4 Dead

1. Braid

Goddamn, that was hard. Everything I finished this year was pretty awesome. Also note, if I hadn’t played Trace Memory last year (a non 2008 released game), then Farcry 2 would have been bumped up a slot and into the list.

Also, out of interest, games that I promised to finish in my Games of ’07 post but still haven’t:

• Mario Galaxy
• Resident Evil 4: Wii Edition
• Condemned
• Yoshi’s Island DS
• The Legend of Zelda: Phantom Hourglass

Maybe I should get cracking on some of these. RE4 in particular is a game that I really need to play to understand why it was so awesome. (Mario Galaxy on the other hand I believe I already kinda realise the awesomeness of.)

Do you remember the thief, dear reader?

I chose him to focus on first, thinking that the background of a murderous thief should be more easily defined, and simpler, than the pompous nobleman character.

I have defined him as a person that suffered greatly in his childhood at the hands of his father, causing him to grow a great hatred toward not only his father, but people in general.

After killing his father at the age of fourteen, he scrounges for a living, stealing what he can to survive. He ramps this up over the course of his life, until he is whirling dervish of pain and death, taking what he wants and killing when he needs.

After defining him so, I have implemented some very simple generic A.I., which takes a thing that the person feels most strongly towards, and chooses a goal and methods based on that.

I didn’t realise it, but as soon as I implemented this and ran it, I saw these traces:

Love to person(father) was -100, goal chosen was kill target
Barr is choosing a method to reach his goal!
I could [kill [it]]...
Alright, I'll do it. I'll [kill him].
Method 'kill target' was chosen.

This was not to plan, of course, and took me somewhat by surprise… apparently, my thief has a lot to learn before he does what I want him to do. He should, ideally, be coming into this situation having already attempted (and failed) to find his father; therefore, even though he may feel the strongest hatred toward his father, he won’t choose to drop everything and keep attempting to find him.

It’s also made me consider a fear table… should he fear his father more than hating him? And if so, he may want to kill him, but would probably be too fearful to actually seek him out…

In any case, this glimpse is a beacon of hope, that I am perhaps heading in the correct direction… and if so, there should be a lot more of these experiences to come.