Making a Game Design Document (GDD)
Before starting any work to actualize my game, I went through a very long period of ideation and made a “Game Design Document” as I had read that this would be a good tactic to nailing down what my game would be. The idea of a Game Design Document (GDD) is that it is an highly descriptive summary of your game that becomes your guiding star when you need to ask
- What do I do next?
- What is this addition I made in service of?
It’s posed as something that develops with you as you develop the game so new people can understand the direction of the game’s development at the current moment. I think this is a very good idea to have at the beginning of a project if you are looking to scope out the game. At first, I used a combination of categories and ideas from a number of templates I had found online and made a single Google Doc to house all of this information.
Game Overview
Gameplay
- Single Player Content
- Tutorial
- Training Mode
- Arcade/Story Mode
- Multiplayer Content
- Tournament Mode
- Online Quick Match
- Online Lobby
Gameplay Mechanics
- Character Actions
- Action Generalization
- Button Layout
- Blocking
- Attack Properties
- Character Movement
- Ground Movement
- Grounded Dash
- Air Movement
- Hover
- Air Dash
- Meters
- Primary
- Secondary (Comeback)
Story
- Backstory
- Game Story Progression
- Cutscenes
Aesthetic
- Visual
- Audio
Characters
- Base Character
Stages
- Training Level
User Interface
- Main Menu
- Battle HUD
You can probably already tell that that was way too much to try and front load for development, especially as a solo dev. Not even a solo dev really, as I had not even begun working on developing any of the ideas that I ended up putting into that GDD. I had put a lot of thought about most of those items before I even got any code to an IDE. I ended up waffling a lot and finding myself just adding and adding to the document as I had ideas, but never thinking about the actual implementation of them. In order to try and break out of this cycle, I ended up gutting that document and pulling a lot of the minutia out of the document into their own specific documents so I can get a much more pared down overview that wasn’t getting into things like combo systems and what meters did what.
The intention is now to have the bare bones to describe to an uninvolved party what the game is and then add to it as I determine what the game actually has or must have, in a more high level description. There was also the realisation that, as a fighting game, I can mostly just ignore the story until I have characters to actually integrate. I could probably push making a story even further back as it is mostly irrelevant to fighting games in most cases.
Game Overview
Gameplay
- Single Player Content
- Tutorial
- Arcade/Story Mode
- Multiplayer Content
- Online Lobby
Gameplay Mechanics
- Character Actions
- Action Generalization
- Character Movement
- Ground Movement
- Hover
- Air Dash
- Meters
- Fuel
- Heat (Comeback)
Story
- Backstory
Aesthetic
- Visual
- Audio
User Interface
- Main Menu
- Battle HUD
Obsidian
I also made the move away from Google Docs to Obsidian.md for my documentation of these efforts as it seemed to provide much better user experience. Plus I could exclusively use Markdown and backlinks for my writing. I highly recommend it as a tool for brainstorming and fleshing out the design of your game in text form. There are a number of FOSS alternatives, I imagine, but this is just the one I was most familiar with and saw content discussed for.
It also makes a great place to just store a lot of references while I work on the game if I come across some sort of material that I think will be useful in the future. This includes stuff like “using deep buffering rather than traditional input buffering” or a list of laser sound effects that I like. I can just throw it into its own note and reference it in a character document if I need to.
GDD Templates
If I were to start over, I would probably follow these templates as they are holistically closer to what I think an ideal GDD would be like. One is a short concise description of the GDD as a pitch and the other is a more detailed description of that that skeleton.