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In my first week, I already analysed other GDDs (which can be found here), but I felt like it didn’t grant me an in-depth understanding of what it is and what it’s used for. In this post, I will be conducting some research on what a GDD is and it’s contents.

A Games Design Document (GDD) is a document that serves as a blueprint from which a game is to be built. This is especially useful since there will be a variety of people in the team with different professions such as sound designers, concept designers, 3D artists and programmers. This helps to define the general direction of the project and helps keep the team on the same page. Not only that but it ensures that effort is spent efficiently to produce a quality product. (Nuclino, n.d.)

Sections in a GDD

• Overview
  • High concept
  • Genre
  • Purpose
  • Impact
• Gameplay
  • The experiences for the player
• Art Bible
  • Character
  • Objects
  • Environment
  • UI
• Mechanics
  • Win / Lose conditions
  • What the game has to offer
  • Combat systems
  • Rules
• Level Design
  • Skill trees
  • Maps
  • Puzzles
• Sound Design
  • Music
  • SFX
  • Voices
• Platform specification and control mapping
  • Player demographics
  • Buttons and keybinds
• Market
  • Player communities
  • Monetization strategies

One thing that I was stumped on was knowing how much my game should cost. As I have no prior knowledge on what goes into making a game and the effort, I went on some Reddit forums for games developers and came across how indie developers justified their price.

Some of the responses (some of these aren’t in response to the post above):

By using the above games as guidelines, I feel slightly more confident with what I want to price this game. As the game itself should have 12-16 hours of game play. With that in mind, I think it would be fair to price this game at £9.99. I have come up with this conclusion as although it wouldn’t have as much content as big companies would have in their games, there is still hard work that has been put into this game. I also think that £10 for a game is pretty standard and affordable, making it accessible to a majority of players. Additionally, I think that this price is justifiable as it offers value for the hours of entertainment whilst also ensuring that the game is a good investment.

Although the pricing really comes down to the person who views it, pricing it at 9.99 would encourage players to have a go and also look at the effort and time spent behind it.

Target Demographic

This game will only be available for PC as when I was browsing online for RPGs that have released their games on console, not many have stayed up for long before getting taken down in the end. As a creator, I want to give my players the best experience possible and I feel like releasing this game on console could potentially be unenjoyable.

Main Menu

The black background here can be replaced with art for the game

Pause Menu

The black background will be a blurred version of the current game that is playing

(This is before the player unlocks sanity and stealth)

(With the sanity bar)

UI – Low sanity

Key features: Noise, dark vignette, sides cracked (like glass/mirror)

In my game, I have come to realise after looking at a few RPGs, that not many of them have UIs. The vital things that are necessary to the game (such as the inventory), can be found in the pause menu. I think that following what most narrative RPGs will work out visually for my game as well. However, I still want to layout my main menu in an eye catching way for the player, the main menu’s buttons should compact and shouldn’t be far away from each other as this can make the player look at too many places at once.

Above, I have come up with a few placements for the main menu. I was reviewing a few previous years GDDs and how they came up with their HUDs, UIs etc was that, they all stayed relatively minimal.

Then, I did a couple of sketches of what the pause menu could look like as well. The second layout was heavily inspired by Paper Lily by Leef6010

Feedback

I asked two people for their feedback for these concepts and how I can improve on these designs;

“I think it’s a good thing that you want to keep your menu screen buttons close together, whenever I play games, I find it a bit annoying when buttons are spaced out. Although it’s a small design choice, it keeps my sanity in check.”

(In regards to the pause menu) “I think you should try to develop the second concept more. The first one is minimalistic- it can be good but I think for your game it would be nice if you had a more intricate design.”

Finalised text layouts

Finally, I came up with this as the main title screen. The point of this concept is to show where the text could go. I also added Nola’s hat as what is currently being selected.

And here’s the mock up of the pause menu! I would also like to state that the back ground for the pause menu will be the current game the player is playing, but blurred.

This prototype was made on Unity with the assets I made which can be found in my art bible. This is roughly what the animation could look like in game as well as the colour scheme.

For the logo design, I wanted to make it look like a ticket or vintage. So the first order of business was to look on Pinterest for circus ticket designs and analyse a couple things: the font, distortion and colours.

In the very quickly compiled mood board above, I have come to the conclusion that in my logo design, the font must be quite thick / chunky with a vintage feel to it. But before I jumped into finding the right font, I wanted to play with word placement and how it would look:

After that, I went to look for free fonts and play around with Adobe Illustrator for the word order. Addtionally I looked at a Youtube tutorial for a vintage font effect.

Finalised design

For my finalised design, I browsed Pinterest different ways to set out logos and eventually came across a ready made alphabet. With this alphabet, I tediously put the words together and went for a more simplistic approach, which in the end, I came to like a lot more.

Vintage circus alphabet – Freepik

The lost souls are the audience members in No Entry After Midnight and if they feed on too many human souls/remains, they go through a transformation into something horrifying. These new manifestations are called “corrupted lost souls”. They are sensitive to sound and vibration, but they’re blind.

Initially, I got inspiration from a character in media called “No face” which is a character from Spirited Away, a Studio Ghibli film.

Lost souls concept art

Displayed above are the concepts of the lost souls that can be found in the audience or carnival at night. The first one shows the state of the soul acting normally, the second one shows the soul in distress, this means the player can do side quests for this soul in exchange for other quest items or currency.

Corrupted lost souls concept art

Here, I practiced some silhouette concept art, plotting down ink without thinking too much of it at first and adding onto those ink shapes. Eventually, I came up with three designs as I wanted to get this done relatively quickly.