Design Documentation | A Game from Start to Finish

A Game from Start to Finish

02:Design Documentation

It can’t be understood until it’s put in words

When actually making a game, what you need next is a blueprint based on the idea you’ve thought up. If you try to start making a game without a blueprint, you might end up with a mess of a game, miss out on the deadline, or even make something completely different.
To prevent all of that from happening, you need to use words to explain ahead of time everything that will make up the game, from movements and reactions to how things are timed and how they’ll be shown.
This blueprint, which uses words (and sometimes pictures, too) to carefully explain the details of your game, is called a game design document. Your game will be put together, in order, based on what’s in this document.

What’s needed for design documentation

At first, there won’t be any sign of a complete game anywhere.
That’s why it’s important to take the half-formed images in your brain, and turn them into words one by one for your game design document.

It’s actually pretty hard to turn images into words. Sure, it’s easy to just mimic some other game, there’s thousands of them around, but that’s not how you make a new game.
To turn an idea into words, at the very least you’ll need to understand that idea yourself.

Do you know that great feeling you get when you’re studying something difficult and finally “get it”?
That’s because you’ve taken a difficult idea and succeeded in explaining it to yourself in your own words.

In the end, whatever you study, it is just like design documentation—you turn an idea into words of your own.

How to build up design documentation skills

Work hard at language arts

Working hard to understand an idea that only exists in your head and then transforming that idea into words is the same as doing writing activities and composition in Language Arts.
You probably have questions and thoughts you keep all to yourself, ones that you’ve never told anyone, right? First of all, trying turning those ideas into words.
It just might become a precious composition to you, a brand new idea that’s never existed anywhere in the world before.