Game design documents

12 hours and you message is 3 hours old? I'm in

can you PM you adress? thanks

 

PM sent to ya, Kev.

 

PM sent

 

Releasing anything based on it without the license would infringe copyrights.
Doing anything based on the documents by itself would be costly (remember that the million are going into actual production, documentation and pre-production is a fraction of total development cost) so no shady developers will do that.

Putting watermark indeed is only asking for trouble and watermarks are plain stupid and should be banned from the internet anyway. Having obtained and scanning releasing those documents is one great action of goodwill but not warrant of sticking a watermark when you consider the work that have been put into it originally.

By the way writing 300-pages design bibles this way is not always a good thing for the video game industry, at least there's an open debate. When you say:
"While their games were average, acclaim's documenting process was top notch"
Consider that there is a relationship.
Documenting = reducing risks, locking contents = doesn't matter if the game ends being bad, it's too late anyway
Building video games is not as simple and mastered as building a movie.
The best games were never built this way.

 

Yep true, but we are talking tech stuff here - no final viewpoint. You shouldnt start a game if you dont believe it will be a success, at least imo.

 

True, but it is still, to a certain extent, a software engineering problem. Design and other technical documents are a requirement in many fields of software engineering and it is natural that some parts of the game industry would rely heavily on them.

 

Fun, charm, gameplay, are partly software engineering but they are not well predictable and understood as of yet. The best games were always built without locked design documents. Blizzard works this way, The Sims were built this way, Nintendo works this way. Wonder why THEIR games are always late and delayed? Because they understood how unpredictable game development is, and they know that accepting this fact allows them to makes the best games.

I agree that documents have their use in particular on large projects. I was mainly reacting to that quote "games were average, but documentation top-notch". So in sense while the design bible may be a read of great interest, it is certainly not a lesson on how to build great video games.

 

Shadowman is owned by Valiant Entertainment (no association with the previous Valiant, they are just using the name they bought)

www.valiantentertainment.com

I Gladiator became Gladiator: Sword of Vengeance and that's owned by Throwback.

 

>>watermarks are plain stupid and should be banned from
>>the internet anyway.
Utter bollocks.


Kev - it's too risky. Think of the potential consequence. That answers your question.

If in 6 months from now it was released via a source that had nothing to do with you then you wouldn't have to worry about all this anyway.

 

Ahh, I missed it, was waiting for PayPal to authorize my card!

If I can still get in, please let me know, Kev.

Cheers! :thumbsup:

 

Would love to see them, alas I think there too hot to be made open. Unless you blanked everything and made a template for new game producers to use?

 

Tasty

 

nice!

 

Made down the road from me. How much would something like this cost?

 

Awesome..!

 

Wow there is even something for Turok 4, very interesting