What is a GDD?
Games Design Document (GDD) is a software design document that serves as a universal instruction for game designers on how to build it. It contains detailed aspects of the design and should be clear to its recipient.
In order to get more familiar with the concept of a GDD, I’ve looked through some of the professionally made ones and I’ve managed to extract core elements that a document like that should include.
Explaining why I chose a certain topic for the game is a good way to start with, followed by presenting the research I’ve done on it. A standard GDD should present the game idea clearly, therefore describe elements such as core gameplay and mechanics of the game, as well as showcase the concept art. It can go into more detail presenting the design of the UI, maps, weapons, vehicles, characters and their skills/ backstories. It should also contain the overall lore of the gameworld and justification for the choice of music and sounds used in the game. It can go into more detail about different game modes, if there are any, rewards, goals and rules. Including a description of visual effects design and 3D art samples is also helpful. Lastly, what is unique about the game?
GDD in Practice
One of the first tasks we were given was to make a rough sketch of a GDD for a random game concept. Together with two of my coursemates, Izzy and Jessie, we followed the instructions on how to do this exercise and started with writing down adjectives that started with the same letter as our names. Then, based on the slideshow the lecturer showed us we matched our birthday dates to game genres and those were our base ideas to start designing from. Among these, we decided that “intense tower defense set in a zombie apocalypse” was the best prompt and we developed it further into a very simplified GDD. This exercise gave me a better idea on how I should approach the GDD for my main project – consider the gameplay, visuals, audio and how would player interact with the gameworld (so all the controls).
Experiential Metaphors in Game Design
To understand the role of essential experiences in games better we were given a task of choosing a metaphor and coming up with a game concept based on it. Together with my coursemates Jessie and Izzy we made a rough sketch of how gameplay for “be under the weather” metaphor would look like. The basic mechanic was to progress through levels while staying under the rainy cloud or else the player would have got burnt by the sun. Even if I don’t base my final game concept on a metaphor the exercise was helpful in looking at essential experience from a different perspective and it definitely helped in my creative process.
Game concept based on personal experience
Another task we had in class was to create a concept of a game based on our own experiences. First, I wrote down all mechanics that seemed interesting to me and tried to combine them in interesting ways.
Here are some sketches of how I imagined the game to look like. It would be a 2-player co-operative game, where one person can only move left with “a” and the other can only move right using “d”. The aim was to successfully land in the water, while avoiding mountains and wind currents. The game was inspired by a situation from real life, when the line of a paraglider I was on with my dad broke and we got detached from the motorboat that was pulling us.
