Game development & design document
For the past three weeks, we have been working on a game as a part of our course in Game Development. The concept of the game was chosen from other groups ideas from the previous course.
My group chose the concept for Day of the Piñata - a side-scrolling action game where the player takes control of a possessed piñata during the Day of the Dead festival, and must collect candy and smash decoration to win.
With a deadline of tomorrow midday, one of many hand-ins related to this project is a design document. As I got the role of lead designer in the team I took the responsibility of writing it, of which I'll share some reflections now.
As I began on the document last tuesday, I have had plenty of time (about one and a half week) to plan it out and work on in as much as I have needed. At the start I had only noticed two problems:
The first was that we had a meeting with one of the teachers only two days from then, where we would discuss the design document and how it could be improved. I realized I had no chance to write anything close to being finished by then so I focused on writing down the very fundamentals of the game's concept (mostly gameplay and setting) and structure of the document.
The feedback we got was obviously very wing clipped because of lack of content of the document. What we got was how I as the designer should arrange the lists of enemies and objects effectively and keep the document updated in the future.
The other problem was that by that time there were still a lot of features, especially the art style, that we hadn't defined yet. Even now, we are still very much more in the pre-production phase rather than actually working on the final product.
This caused me to spend a lot of time consulting the concept document, asking the other team members how they interpreted a certain feature or simply thinking by myself what the best way to go was. This was a downside as it may have taken more time than it should have. We could have prepared better by taking notes early on on things we decided.
Even though, this was no major problem, as we had decided to sit down every day for the bigger part of the day to work on our individual tasks with the project together. This was especially helpful for me as any questions or opinions I had that were directed to the whole team (and I had a lot) could be answered quickly.
Furthermore, I suspect this won't be a problem in the future as we have already now defined more or less the entire game's features. From now on we can simply look in the design document whenever we wonder something about the game.
The rest of the time up to the deadline proceeded without any problems. I quickly adopted a routine of coming to the meetings with the group every day and simply follow templates and requirements for the design document, asking the others whenever I was unsure about something, and decide whenever something should be added or removed. In the final few days I started to add pictures and fine-tuning the structure and headlines of the text until I felt I couldn't add much more.
