Soon I am done with the Document
This week I have been working on the design document. It is going well and I have put down all my time to it. It will soon be done and my fellow team mates can look at it and give me some response. I have been dealing with the games details. Things that make a game work. A design document is a little like a rulebook. If you follow the document every part of the game from coding to art will be easier to do. Everyone in the team will be on the same page.
This week I wrote about Player, N.P.C’s, player resources, game hazards, critical points, environment and starting with game flow today. Writing the design document I used document we got from Adam Mayes, It had some great guidelines to follow. Some sections of the document we got were a little confusing. I think some of points in document were almost the same. Like some of the play mechanics I also wrote same thing in player resources. It says that I should go into detail of the game interface and how it works. And our health bar and ammo bar is a part of that, but is also a resource that fills up by you having to wait for it to fill up. I guess I could go into more detail but it is not that complicated how it works. Most of what is in the guide template is great and I will probably use it again in other projects I will do.
I also used a design document from a game called Captain Claw. It is one of my favorite games. It has some great ways use a design document. For example how it shows each of its enemies and item. They make these tables, looking like this.
I use these now because they make every enemy so easy to explain. It is also easy for the coders and artist to see what part they need to work on, the now how many frames each animation needs, how much damage an enemy does, how much health and so on. And it looks nice too.
The Claw document has really helped me and inspired me to make a document.
space1nvder 
It’s great to hear that the design document is taking shape and that you’re putting a lot of energy into making it as detailed as possible! A robust design document will be of great use to you during the rest of the project.
Interesting post Anthon! Since I have never written a game design document before you gave me some insight on how to go about writing one. For example, that you actually can look up game design documents of games you really like to see how the developers have structured theirs. I’ve heard that it is a great amount to keep track on when you are writing one and to look on already made ones is a great source for help.
Did you have any way of structuring your work writing this document? Like, did you find the SCRUM document helpful in remembering all the artifacts that help build your game or did you just go from memory writing it?
I would suggest that you, for your future posts, read them out loud to yourself because the structure is a little bit off at times and that makes it hard to understand where you are getting at.
Also keep in mind to make sure that you are above the 400+ word margin when writing these posts since it is a part of the assignment. A tip is to write your posts in Word where, as you might already know, there is a word counter to keep track on how many words you have written.
Anyways, hope all is going well and good luck with writing the rest of the game design document!
Thank you for the respons!
First of all my name is Anton 🙂
And yes I used the Scrum document but also went from memory, it was a combination of both.