Games by Andrex

The Importance of a Design Doc

4kg isn’t the first game I’ve attempted to make. (It is, however, the first I’ve gotten this far into making.)

There have been more than 20 others, I’d say. Maybe even a lot more than that, but it depends on your definition of actually developing a game. Some game ideas, I just did some basic plot and game design work for. Others I’d go in so excited, set up whatever development suite I was using at the time (which ranged from Game Maker 5 a long time ago all the way up to XNA 2 last year), grudgingly make three sprites, and then stop for good.

But 4kg is different. I can feel it, the progress I’m making is almost tangible. Why is 4kg so different from those failed projects?

Before, I thought it was my aversion to artistry. I’m a coder by nature, and I’ve been told time and time again that coders don’t make art; they code. So that’s what I thought. And stopping each game project dead whenever I needed some art certainly reinforced this position.

But today, I’m going to say that no, it’s not because I’m a coder and thus I’m automatically predisposed against the right half of my brain.

No, it’s because I never had a plan. I’d come up with a couple neat gameplay gimmicks, maybe some characters and some of the plot (usually the final fights.) So when I decided I needed art, I didn’t know where to start. Whenever I completed a sprite, I saw it as throwing a paper airplane across the ocean. I never knew how much needed to be done.

This went for coding, too. Art was the easy scapegoat but I was also usually clueless when it came to coding (or in the case of my Game Maker projects, using the visual editor.) I had all these neat gameplay ideas I wanted the main character to be able to do, but I never nailed any of them down. “When you press this, he should go fast.” Well, how fast? When should he stop? Are there any sounds associated with this? Etc.

With 4kg, I said enough. It’s time to get serious. When I first got the idea for 4kg last December, right after I wrote it up on my sketchpad (as I was half-asleep when it struck me), I started writing its design document.

This was new to me. I had no idea how to write one and there weren’t many good examples online. The Gamasutra one (probably the best example I found) for instance was just too complicated for its own good. This slowed me down a bit, and I became frustrated with my lack of experience with writing a design doc.

A couple months later, after I had committed myself in my mind (and on NeoGAF) to finish 4kg before the end of the year, I decided to revisit my design doc. I decided the hell with it, and focused on making a game design document that was personally agreeable to me. Because it doesn’t matter how well you follow someone else’s standards, it only matters if its usable by you.

So, for the formatting, I kept it extremely simple. Here’s the style I used:

• All text was of the same font family and size.
• Normal headings (Heading 1, Heading 2, etc.) went unused.
• Bold was only used for heading text.
• Italics text denoted another game or movie.
• Nothing was indented except for lists.
• Lists were only one level deep.
• There were no images or text colors.

I guess I can show a shot of the design doc in action (maybe some slight spoilers):

Sshh. ;)

The entire document is like this. It has also only existed in Google Docs, which was useful for sharing it with my ex-artist (and in the future possibly with my music collaborators.) It’s also helped for when I need to work on it away from home, but I’ve gone over Google Docs’ strengths in a previous post I suppose. =P

By not getting bogged down by formatting and constant re-formatting, I instead shifted the focus to the content. This helped me concentrate on what I actually wanted to accomplish for 4kg. Instead of a throwing paper planes across the ocean, I was placing a plank firmly in place for a well-defined picket fence. I enjoy making sprites and coding now! The end-goal of actually completing a game seems attainable at last.

But I wasn’t finished with my design doc, and in fact I wasn’t until very recently. It’s easy to put parts in like “this feature may or may not be included,” “this section pending player feedback,” and “this section will be filled out later.” The truly challenging part is going back after the initial “wow this game idea is so cool!” rush and cleaning up and completing the whole thing.

Now, making it in the first place isn’t a piece of cake. It forces you to get your head out of the clouds and focus on not only what you actually want (instead of saying, “I’ll think it up on the fly”), but also what you can actually accomplish. For instance, in 4kg I had the idea that in the second world, the player would be affected by wind and sand blowing around. But I had no idea how to code the player to respond to that or the effects necessary to realistically display the sand in such a fashion. So I had to cut that out. Another idea was that the player robot could fire shots of energy from a “core cannon” in his chest, but that required a higher degree of collision detection for enemies than I can do and the system behind it proved very complicated to pin down (does the energy refuel itself? What’s the cool-down time? How much damage does it do? Etc.)

So definitely, firing up a text editor and filling it with your ideas isn’t easy. And going back and revising it to be your complete vision isn’t any easier. The goal, of course, is that when you finish your design doc, you can give it to some game dev stranger and they’d produce a game that’s 95% of what you were thinking it’d be. You want to be as specific and detailed as possible (but not overdue it, use your judgment.) My personal guiding principal was that if I died before finishing 4kg and my will pointed to my design doc, that my family could pick it up and finish it (by contacting other programmers/artists of course.)

I’ll be opening up 4kg’s design document for public viewing after the game is finished and posting the link here. (Be warned though, I front-loaded it with all the spoilery story bits, so please beat it before reading!) I hope it serves as a good example for others who are in the situation I was.

-Andrex