What is a Game Design Document?

• A centralized, coherent set of ‘design rules’ to ensure a consistency across multidisciplinary teams. A living document created in pre-production but updated throughout production.
• Think of it as a dictionary/glossary / set of guidelines (or some will say it’s a set of design pillars) that teams can refer to when they have questions.
• A living document created in pre-production but updated throughout production

Sections in a GDD :

1. Overview (high concept, genre, purpose, niche, message / impact, vibez)
2. Gameplay (what kind of experience are you scaffolding for players?)
3. Story (gameworld, lore, narrative, writing samples)
4. Art (character, objects, environments, UI, perspective)
5. Mechanics (verbs, rules, win and fail states, inventory / economic / combat systems, physics)
6. Levels (skill trees, maps, puzzle evolutions)
7. Sound (music, extradiegetic sounds, intradiegetic sounds, voice)
8. Platform specification and control mapping (gamefeel, engine, player demographics)
9. Market (player communities, monetization strategies, marketplace positioning)

The essential experience

“You don’t need to perfectly replicate real experiences tomake a good game. What you need to do is to capture the essenceof those experiences for your game”

• What experience do I want the player to have?
• What is essential to that experience?
• How can my game capture that essence?