Game Design Document Design
Oct. 11th, 2022 09:29 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
relee9:30pm - Well! It's been a while since the last one, again, but I'm working. Yesterday I finally set up Joplin on my devices so I don't have to worry about having adult stuff in my stuff stored on clouds, and the cloud services getting upset over it. I'd like to say "They shouldn't be peeking at my documents, anyways!" and it's kinda true, but the governments of the world are kinda pressing it on them. Gotta find all that cheese pizza and criminal plots, right? Well, I don't make either, but while they're looking it turns out they don't like adult entertainment. Sex work is work, and apparently making video games about kinky stuff is sex work. Folks do point out now and then that whether you're selling yourself for sex or for physical labour, you're selling your body, so the ethical dilemna is weird. In my case, I'm not really selling anything, though I would like to make a profit over my kinky shit and computer skills.
So, I was planning to start with the structure of how the player's transformation state/body is stored, but I realized I didn't really have anyplace to put that information. I thought about it, and I think I need a Game Design Document. I started looking into GDDs and how they're made, what they should include, that sort of thing. There's a lot of views and opinions on that, though, and also whether you should have one at all.
The best information I found though was this article: https://gamedevbeginner.com/how-to-write-a-game-design-document-with-examples/
The best advice from that was this part:
When you write your game design document, it can help to think about why you actually need one in the first place.
Otherwise, it can be extremely difficult to know what should be in it, how detailed it should be or what it should even look like.
For example, do you want a simple overview page that you can use to keep track of your game’s high-level concepts, or do you want a marketing focussed summary that you can give to publishers or investors?
Do you want to be able to keep track of your game’s story, lore or items?
Or do you want to be able to show a developer exactly how a feature works or what a level should look like?
Your design document might do one of these things or it might do all of them but, what’s important is that you understand what information your design document is supposed to provide and who it’s going to provide it to.
Knowing that will help you to decide what needs to be included.
So basically I need to design my own GDD before I can use that to design my game!
In my use case, what I need is a lot of technical documentation about how the game is structured. Also things like area designs, characters, gameplay stuff... It's likely that all the non-procgen text in the game will also exist in the GDD at the same time, so it's not quite the same as some of the GDD ideas/definitions I've seen.
My current plan is to do it in Joplin, using seperate notes for seperate sections. We'll see how it goes.
Also, as an aside, I had forgotten that since I don't use Dreamwidth's rich text input option, I have to format things myself with HTML, and I think that anchor and the italics tags are the only HTML statements I've written in over a year. I'm seriously rusty! It's been a long time since I've done any game coding, too. I hope I can shake the rust off that pretty quick. Godot 4.0 is supposed to actually be coming out, soon. They're fully in Beta and I think there might be release candidates?
9:54pm - Honestly, I'd really like to keep working on this but I have something starting in like, five minutes, and need to rush to get ready. XD
So, I was planning to start with the structure of how the player's transformation state/body is stored, but I realized I didn't really have anyplace to put that information. I thought about it, and I think I need a Game Design Document. I started looking into GDDs and how they're made, what they should include, that sort of thing. There's a lot of views and opinions on that, though, and also whether you should have one at all.
The best information I found though was this article: https://gamedevbeginner.com/how-to-write-a-game-design-document-with-examples/
The best advice from that was this part:
How to decide what should be in your game design document
When you write your game design document, it can help to think about why you actually need one in the first place.
Otherwise, it can be extremely difficult to know what should be in it, how detailed it should be or what it should even look like.
For example, do you want a simple overview page that you can use to keep track of your game’s high-level concepts, or do you want a marketing focussed summary that you can give to publishers or investors?
Do you want to be able to keep track of your game’s story, lore or items?
Or do you want to be able to show a developer exactly how a feature works or what a level should look like?
Your design document might do one of these things or it might do all of them but, what’s important is that you understand what information your design document is supposed to provide and who it’s going to provide it to.
Knowing that will help you to decide what needs to be included.
So basically I need to design my own GDD before I can use that to design my game!
In my use case, what I need is a lot of technical documentation about how the game is structured. Also things like area designs, characters, gameplay stuff... It's likely that all the non-procgen text in the game will also exist in the GDD at the same time, so it's not quite the same as some of the GDD ideas/definitions I've seen.
My current plan is to do it in Joplin, using seperate notes for seperate sections. We'll see how it goes.
Also, as an aside, I had forgotten that since I don't use Dreamwidth's rich text input option, I have to format things myself with HTML, and I think that anchor and the italics tags are the only HTML statements I've written in over a year. I'm seriously rusty! It's been a long time since I've done any game coding, too. I hope I can shake the rust off that pretty quick. Godot 4.0 is supposed to actually be coming out, soon. They're fully in Beta and I think there might be release candidates?
9:54pm - Honestly, I'd really like to keep working on this but I have something starting in like, five minutes, and need to rush to get ready. XD
