A design document is exactly that. It's a document that sets out the design of your game, and is really very handy to use as pitch materials to pitch your fully fleshed out game idea. There are several different ones out there and I don't endorse any one over the other, but they are out there. It's up to you to find one that works best for you, and I won't really get into creating a full design document in this course. Since that stuff is pretty easy to look up and find on the Internet. However, it's important to see how the game story materials you've been creating here can fit into any game design document template. So let's get to know a general game design document, very loosely merging outlines published by the websites gamasutra and sloperama.com. You may want to follow other templates to your liking but for the most part this is not a bad way to go and I found both these sites extremely helpful. Now you generally want to start off with an explanation of what your game is as an intro. What's your game story and why I, as the reader of your design document should really care and like it. This is the perfect place to throw in the spine that you developed to hook your reader in and get them interested. This is why having a really snazzy and electric spine is so important. Then I suggest moving on to a very brief explanation of the objective of your game. Perhaps in a short couple of paragraphs. What are you doing as the player to accomplish whatever you just set out in your spine? Are you trying to rack up coins or points? Are you rescuing a princess for example? [NOISE] Quiz. Make sure you cover the basic feel and genre of type of game play. You know, first person shooter, role-playing, real time strategy, and so on. The spine and the objectives are where you will win or lose most of your readers. And you should be as strong and clear as possible in stating the opening of your design document. You can also incorporate some of the more striking and important art that you've created for the game here in the intro. But briefly, so perhaps one or two illustrations that really support the spine and the objective. Now, after this intro if it's a page or two, you could move on to a more detailed description of your game that we'll call the Detailed Game Overview. Take us through the game, start to finish, adds a rough chronology of the story with an idea of how this is presented in the game. This, of course, uses the story synopsis we've written mixed in with bits of the story presentation scheme that we've also written. Using the shooter from last week as an example, we would walk the reader through how the game starts. All the way down to how Jake shoots down Dead-eye Jane to reclaim his title. We would say something like, we start with a pre-rendered cut-scene animation in the main office of the League of Shooters. Where our hero Jake, walks in to sign up for this year's competition. We continue writing, then we start the game-play with the first competition where we are in first-person shooting mode. Picture-in-picture windows cut in and out through a heads-up chat display as Emily, a contestant in the first round with Jake, talks with him as they shoot. Here we learn that Jake has lost his family and that Deadeye Jane is etc and etc and etc. This process is sometimes also explained very well by creating a game flowchart. Which we'll explore a little bit later. Why on earth did I have you write these separate documents, the synopsis and the presentation scheme, if in the design document I'm recommending that you merge them together like this. Why not just jump straight into it? Well, simply put, it's a lot easier to design the story of your game if you are able to focus on one aspect at a time, like the story and just the story. And then moving on to thinking about how the game presents that story. Plus also in doing it the way I've recommended in previous weeks it allows you to have a lot of different iterations. And the chance to develop the idea more and more with each separate pass, each separate document that you create. There's a lot of power to that. Finally, wrap up your intro with a couple of paragraphs that speak to the gameplay aspects of your game. For instance, with Angry Birds, you would write about how you flick the birds at the pigs with your finger, and how different Birds give you other ways of knocking over the pigs. For StarCraft 2 you decide how the player manages units on the ground to execute their strategy for each mission in the game's pre-defined maps. This is the core of your gameplay, and should be discussed here, along with any deviations or changes or twists that you plan on in that gameplay.
