Book Image

Practical Game Design

By : Adam Kramarzewski, Ennio De Nucci
Book Image

Practical Game Design

By: Adam Kramarzewski, Ennio De Nucci

Overview of this book

If you are looking for an up-to-date and highly applicable guide to game design, then you have come to the right place! Immerse yourself in the fundamentals of game design with this book, written by two highly experienced industry professionals to share their profound insights as well as give valuable advice on creating games across genres and development platforms. Practical Game Design covers the basics of game design one piece at a time. Starting with learning how to conceptualize a game idea and present it to the development team, you will gradually move on to devising a design plan for the whole project and adapting solutions from other games. You will also discover how to produce original game mechanics without relying on existing reference material, and test and eliminate anticipated design risks. You will then design elements that compose the playtime of a game, followed by making game mechanics, content, and interface accessible to all players. You will also find out how to simultaneously ensure that the gameplay mechanics and content are working as intended. As the book reaches its final chapters, you will learn to wrap up a game ahead of its release date, work through the different challenges of designing free-to-play games, and understand how to significantly improve their quality through iteration, polishing and playtesting.
Table of Contents (22 chapters)
Title Page
Copyright and Credits
Packt Upsell
Contributors
Preface
Index

Chapter 4. Design Documentation

Writing game design documents (GDDs) is one of the main responsibilities of every game designer. The whole point of having a game designer in a team is to ensure that someone is taking care of putting everything about the game in black and white—someone able to define and communicate ideas, mechanics, and any other information the team might need to know in order to develop the game.

Many novice game designers (and game developers in general) look online or ask friends in the industry for a game design document template that they can use as a starting point for writing their own documentation. The general misconception is thatif it worked for someone else, it will do for me.

As opposed to a game concept document, where there are established rules and information that must be included in a certain way (due to the selling purpose nature of the document), a GDD doesn't follow a determined structure or format, and the information it contains can greatly vary depending...