Design documentation stages

  1. Design treatment or concept paper
  2. Design summary/design documents
  3. Design specification/product specification/production document

 

Game/design treatment

  1. Game story
  2. Game play and look
    1. Focus on appearance
    2. Player roles and actions
    3. Strategies and motivations
  3. Development specifications – HW and SW, Algorithm style

 

Design document

  1. Start with basic idea of the game
  2. Start detailing plot line
    1. Players goal and achievements and work backwards
  3. Outline every section of the game

 

Game outline

  1. Describe universal elements- common features to every part of the game (scoring rules, names, special powers etc)
  2. Details of every scene or game level
    1. Name for scene
    2. Detail
    3. Physical and audio appearance
    4. Background or playfield
    5. Foreground objects and characters
    6. Animations present for the scenes
    7. Music and sound effects
    8. Script for characters
    9. Scenes and transitions
    10. Flow charts for story branches
    11. Anything else

 

Design documents

  1. Executive summary
  2. Product specification
  3. Game specification
  4. Art specification

 

Product specification

  1. Production team
  2. Target audience
  3. Time — game play and shelf life
  4. Production tools
  5. Schedule of milestones and deliverables

 

Game specification

  1. What is it like to play
  2. Mock up the interface
  3. Summary of the story line
  4. Story boards
  5. Character bibles
  6. Flow charts to show transitions
  7. Scripts for each scene

 

Considering detail

  1. What can characters do? Fly jump invisible?
  2. How many enemies does hero fight?
  3. What weapons are available?
  4. How does the player get rejuvenated?
  5. Multi-player stuff?
  6. What is game perspective?
  7. What kind of sound track?
  8. What about main character personality?

 

Designing the puzzle (LaMothe CD) makes the game interesting

 

Types of puzzles

  1. Ordinary use of objects
  2. Unusual use of an ordinary object
  3.  Information puzzles
  4. Codes and word puzzles
  5. Excluded memo – cause and effect kind of actions
  6. People puzzles
  7. Timing puzzles
  8. Sequence puzzles
  9. Logic puzzles – riddles, dialog …
  10. Trial and error
  11. Machinery puzzles
  12. Alternate interfaces
  13. Mazes

 

What makes puzzles bad?

  1. Unnecessary repetition
  2. Restore puzzle – find answer to puzzle when you die
  3. Arbitrary puzzles – cause should be linked to effects instead of random
  4. Designer puzzles – only designer can solve the puzzle
  5. Binary puzzle – wrong à death
  6. Hunt the pixel
  7. Unnecessary interludes

 

What makes puzzles good?

  1. Solvable
  2. Being fair
  3. No down time
  4. Randomness – different each time you played
  5. Naturalness to environment
  6. Amplify a theme
  7. Principle of least astonishment
  8. Hints

 

Levels of difficulty

  1. Bread crumbs – at first everything works well and then give less direct help, if user struggles give more help
  2. Proximity of puzzle to solution – a fair game gives a user everything they need to know
  3. Alternate solutions
  4. (Bad) red herrings
  5. Steering a player

 

Character bibles

  1. Journals – designer writes a biography of the characters, updates the life experiences
  2. Scripting – hypertext or linear

 

Prototyping – design a little, implement a little, and test a little

  1. Get client involved early – customer driven design
  2. Goals
    1. What will finish product look like?
    2. What do you need to do?
    3. Can we produce the product at all?
    4. Can we attract a publisher?

 

 

 

 

Key points to design document

  1. Explicit philosophy game goals
  2. Make it readable
  3. Give priorities to idea so everyone knows what is important and what is rejected
  4. Give all details cause and effect tables
  5. How will you do things --  motion, animation