These are techniques borrowed from creative writing, presentation design, technical documentation writing, and best practices that game designers have used and refined over thousands of game projects.
Here follows a list of useful techniques to write effective GDDs.
The style in which you write matters; as with any other document, you need to make sure your GDD is readable and attractive to look at:
- Use plenty of white space and divide argument paragraphs
- Use a serif font for body text, bold or capital letters for headers
- Avoid any fancy or decorative fonts
- Use short sentences
- Use a hierarchical structure
When you write about something, you should always use a top-down approach to layering complexity. The first layer should already give a goodgeneral idea of what you’re talking about, and successive layers should go deeper into details.
Think about how journalists write articles for newspapers. When reading an article, you can generally always get the...