What is a GDD?
Firstly, what is a GDD? A GDD is a centralised, coherent set of ‘design rules’ to ensure a consistency across
multidisciplinary teams. A GDD is able to outline your plans for characters, environments, game play, levels, visual style, and many more exciting elements. It’s somewhere where teams can refer to when they have questions relating to your game and hopefully find the games they are looking for. This document is created in pre-production to my fully formed game but is somewhere where I am able to return to and update throughout production.
Elements in a GDD
After analysing some previous GDD’s here are some of the elements I found that are useful to have in my own GDD:
- Game overview & concepts
- Game mechanics
- Art – (character, objects, environments, UI, perspective)
- Major & Minor focus
- Sound
- Narratives
Some examples of a GDD
Silent Hill 2
Super Mario Bros
