Welcome to the Game Design Document Site

Okay, so it's not spectacular. This is just a simple site I put together to provide new game developers with a set of web templates they can drop into their game site and write their game design documents.

The art of writing game design documents is one that is terribly missed in the game development world, especially when it comes to independant developers. Often they just rush in and start coding a game with little or no idea what they're doing or where they're going. This is probably the single most-important factor in new game failure. Any software needs a plan. When a level designer sits down to build a new map for Unreal or Enemy Territory, they research the period, plan the layout and work from ideas (even if they're written down on cocktail napkins). Failure to do any kind of planning means you start with a blank sheet and more often than not, end up abandoning a partially done job that could have been great. That's where planning and documentation come in.

I'm sure everyone will groan with agony about writing documentation, even more so than writing help files (at least the end users see that result). These documents are for you and your team. Even with a team of one, planning is key and knowing the road ahead is going to make the trip that much more effective and worthy of doing.

The documents here were based on Chris Taylors' excellent Design Document template. The package is simple. A set of simple HTML files you can edit to your needs. There is no formatting in them except for some basic tags. Drop into your website, apply a stylesheet and you've got a great resource to share with your user community. Feel free to share these with others. If you do feel there should be updates done, don't hesitate to email me here and I'll post updates here.

You can view the files online here.

You can download a zip package of the web files here.