Creating documentation for your game

じ☆ve冰风

Topic: Creating Design Documents and Style Guides for games

Description: I'll cover a number of items that would be useful to include in documentation and pre-production for a game

Requirements: Basically any document-creating program, or if you're feeling really manual, you can make these in a notebook

There’s an old saying that goes “Everyone wants to create, nobody wants to do maintenance”. I believe, in a similar vain, nobody wants to do preparation. And who could blame them? When making a game, its easy to get excited about an idea and just get to going immediately with Mapping, eventing, scripting, etc. But before that, especially with projects you expect to take a while, You should slow down and write out your intentions into one or two types of document: Design Documents, and if applicable, style guides. I’m gonna give you some tips and reminders about what to include.

But first: Why? The idea is already in my head, ain’t it? Well, the thing is, our brains are generally not very good at being specific in the realm of imagination. An idea can feel fully realized in your head when your brain is just hiding all the unfinished bits. When you write things out, these unfinished ideas come to light and force you to answer them. It can also mitigate scope creep, because having to write out every step that needs to exist for the game to come together, and add onto it when you add more stuff, can help prevent you from create systems that are far too much for what you have the resources to accomplish. Lastly, it allows you to communicate with a other people to make the game, if you should need to do so for any reason.

Now then, what do we up into this thing? Here’s a long, but unlikely to be exhaustive list for a game design document:

• General story outline
  
  
  
  • How many areas? What needs to happen in those areas? What do the places generally look/feel like?
    
  • Who’s involved? What are they generally like as characters? Could also include reference sheets or concept art
    
  
  

• Game mechanics
  
  
  
  • How does combat work (is there even combat)?
    
  • Are there puzzle elements? What are they? What sorts of rules and restrictions are there to the puzzle mechanics?
    
  • This is also the place to put things like crafting, minigames, or other auxiliary game mechanics. List out how they should be implemented and how important they are to the overall game.
    
  • What kind of enemies are there? What do they do?
    
  
  
• General amount of assets to be made/obtained
  
  
  
  • What sorts of stuff do you need for maps?
    
  • How many unique character and enemy designs?
    
  • How much music?
    
  • Special assets for UI
    
    
    
    • These could be things like fonts or icons
      
    
    
  
  

Now then, it’s also important to remember while looking at this: The design document can be edited, it doesn’t need to be created all at once.

Now, when creating the design document, it’s important to make it in a “searchable” way. Generally, just make sure that your information is near other related information. For instance, Enemy mechanics might be near the list of enemy varieties or the general combat mechanics, but it makes very little sense to place that information with, for instance, a list of tiles needed for a desert area.

The second document of importance is paramount if you’re making the assets for your game yourself, and somewhat negotiable if you’re not: A style guide. For artists, this is because your art will evolve as you keep making art, and you aren’t going to make all of the game’s assets in one sprint. It’s highly likely that you may forget the specifics of the style you have created for the game. Here are some things to include when making a style guide to remind you what the rules are:

• Line weight and color: How thick are the lines, are they black or something else? Are you using a texture brush to make them?
  
• Color palette: Are you going for a hyper-saturated look, monochrome?
  
  
  
  • Also: Who uses what colors? If you have the Red Empire attacking the Holy Blue Kingdom, it’d be awkward (or foreshadowing) if the Holy king is also wearing red.
    
  
  
• Levels of shading
  
  
  
  • This can also include things like hue shifting (Are shadows warm or cold?)
    
  
  
• Level of detail
  
• Character design sheets and rules (If you have characters that look or move in a specific way, it’s a good idea to write it down, or even better, include a visual example in the document)
  
• Stylistic specifics (Things like “We draw hands with 3 fingers” or “Everyone but the protagonist has brown hair”)
  

Now, here at the end I will link to some series bibles and my own style guide as examples, and I highly encourage others who see this thread to leave additional examples. I would put my design document here as well, but I actually made that by hand.

• Style Guide for New Dawn for the Elements
  
• The Simpsons handbook (With how stylized the show is, this one is incredibly detailed)
  

本贴来自国际rpgmaker官方论坛作者:Timeline_man处,因国际论坛即将永久关站,为了存档多年珍贵资料,署名转载到本论坛存档,由于官方帖子为英文原帖，需要中文翻译请点击论坛顶部切换语言为中文就可以将帖子翻译成中文浏览,方便大家随时查看,原文地址：https://forums.rpgmakerweb.com/threads/creating-documentation-for-your-game.178123/