About the GDD
As mentioned in the blog post “Indie Games”, a Game Design Document, or GDD for short, is typically a detailed guide that can be used to keep track of the core themes, styles, features, mechanics and ideas of your game project. [1]
The main purpose of a game design document is to communicate the details of your project to either yourself, as you work on your game over time, or to other people, such as team members, publishers, stakeholders or people who will be playing your game, as part of a crowdfunding campaign or early access product. [2]
Put simply, it’s the tool that you’ll use to manage and develop the concept of what your game is, how it’s supposed to work and how it will be built. [3]
A GDD usually consists of:
- The Game Overview
This section gives the reader the introduction to the document. It contains the target audience and platforms, feature set, game genre, game flow summary, and project scope.
“The Overview section in a Game Design Document (GDD) serves as a concise and essential introduction to the entire project. This serves as a compass that guides the development process and ensures everyone involved is on the same page.” [4]
2. The Game Story and Setting
This section describes the story of the game and its setting. The story is one of the key elements of a game and it needs to be well defined for the game to work. Here it is necessary to define the games genre.
3. Defined Gameplay
This section describes the core mechanics of the game, camera view, primary objectives and goals, secondary objectives and goals, game progression, players journey, player rewards, penalties, play flow, and interactivity mechanics.
4. Defined Visual Identity (art and design)
This section contains the game vision mood board, audio, music and sound effects.
5. Technical Stack
“A tech stack, short for „technology stack,“ refers to the combination of software, programming languages, frameworks, libraries, and tools used to build and run your game.” [5]
This section contains the target hardware, development hardware, and the used softwares.
There are also some development procedures and standards one needs to follow. These are scripting language, version control, coding standards, and external libraries/plugins.
6. Marketing and Monetizing
This section contains target marketing and demographics, competitor and market analysis, pricing and distribution strategy, future opportunities, marketing plan, and marketing channels.
7. Milestones
Milestones make it easier to have an overview of all the things that need to be at a certain time and contain all deadlines. Possible milestones could be game engine design, character concept art, background concept art, level design etc.
8. Budget
When budgeting for game development, it’s crucial to make sure your financial plan is comprehensive and realistic. Common one-time costs are asset creation, software and tools, licensing and copyrights, legal and intellectual property, initial marketing, testing and QA setup, localization, and prototyping.
9. Team
The team section usually contains all the team members with their defined roles and responsibilities, their qualifications, and the communication plan.
[1] French 2022
[2] French 2022
[3] French 2022
[4] Au 2023
[5] Au 2023
References
- French 2022 = French, John (6. 5. 2022): How to write a game design document (with examples). In: Game Design, https://gamedevbeginner.com/how-to-write-a-game-design-document-with-examples/ (Date retrieved: 13. 11. 2023)
- Au 2023 = Au, Kaman (17. 9. 2023): Game Design Document Step-by-Step Guide (with fre Notion template). In: https://medium.com/@aukixd/game-design-document-step-by-step-guide-with-free-notion-template-63a2e403df82 (Date retrieved: 13. 11. 2023)
