Looking for Game Design/Planning Documents

I will be making (and hopefully marketing) a simple game next summer. I want to look at a few examples of design documents before I begin, since I want to have a design document as well.

I really don't care what the game is, or whether it is released or not. I'll take PDF's, photocopies, or reasonably priced originals. All sources kept in confidence.

 

...Call me 'old fashioned' but surely if you have an idea for a game, which you must have being as you plan to market, why not sketch down the plan and use that instead?

...Damn near all design doc's are 'unique', they will/should never 'match' your game, whatever genre it may be.

...From a promotional point of view the doc must stand out from the crowd, it's you're job to make the design work on paper and in practice.

...If you try to follow a 'copy' / follow someone else's 'pattern' you will probably struggle, imo.

 

I understand that each design document is attempting to accomplish something different and that they are generally tailored towards "selling" the idea of the game to someone. I do not intend to copy from them or pattern my design document. I just want to see some examples of them; see what looks good, what doesn't.

For me it's like writing my absolute first resume. I could just blindly go off and put down every little detail about my life and send it off without ever having seen an actual resume. Or I could look around at other resumes, see what is in them, how they are organized. Not necessarily to pattern my resume off of, merely to familiarize myself with the contents of a resume.

It's like research and exposing myself to more information. I hope that makes sense...

 

Game design documents fall in to several main catagories.

Firstly you will have the proposal wich will be a couple of pages aimed at selling the idea to an investor. You will then have a detailed game design which will describe the functionality of all the game processes (front-end, level descriptions, etc.)

Next you will need to come up with a development design document. Here you will detail the actual game systems and interfaces between those systems and the requirements of those systems. You will need to specify both code and asset (textures, models, sounds, etc) requirements. You will then need detailed design documents (How you intend to build the systems, not what they do)

Finally you will need to document the development process, scheduling using gant charts, tracking changes to all the above documents, unit test results, sign-offs, etc.

This is for a large commercial game. Smaller games will obviously have smaller requirements, depending on team size and game complexity, but you will still need at least some of the above documents.

If you want to see design docs for some commercial games then you will struggle. They are generally the most commercially sensitive of the docs. They will also be in a constant state of change, or out of date. They are quite often lost or destroyed as they are not usually tracked as well for changes.

You could try taking a look at gamedev.net for some smaller scale design help. There are a number of 'hobbyist' programmers there who will be quite willing to share their experiences.

 

You can look at school/students projects documentation, there's billions available on the web and I presume that some are of excellent quality.

Documentation for a small non-business driven project is however more written brain-masturbation than really useful IMHO. It's easy to get sidetracked and get all excited at the perspective of doing this and this and this..

 

ISO requirements at where i work require that such documents are destroyed once they fall out of date/spec. We only keep the plans of the most current projects.

 

gamedev.net has some you can download in order to see a general pattern among the documents.

When you are proposing the idea, don't make it longer than ONE page, and don't type it in small text.

If its going to be an RPG, then a 2-3pages is fine, but don't go further than that, it wastes their time, really. But if it is a simple game in nature like an FPS, adventure, etc. then don't let it be over one page long.

And yeh, there are multiple types of design documents. There is the:


-Initial proposal document (I call it that, at least), that you use to sell your idea.

-Development design document. A much more detailed version of the initial proposal, and where you plan out the development process of the game, which parts are worked on first, second, last, etc. Also, you include initial artwork, sketches, etc.

-Final is the Technical Design Document. this includes all the code, artwork, final sketches, model drawings, etc. It also includes matrix charts on how the actual flow of the development process was done. This document can reach levels of 1000+pages, even for a simple action FPS game.