Creating and Using Design Documents

Game design documents actually have two roles. Everyone is familiar with their development role : Design documents help a team of people to create a game. As we said in Chapter 1, "What Is Game Design?," one of the stages of game design is communicating the design to others, and that's what design documents do. Even if you're developing a game all by yourself, it's useful to write down the things you've decided on, to make notes and lists of features that you want to include in the game.

Design documents also play a sales role. This doesn't mean selling the game to the public; it means selling the idea of the game to a publisher. The document is crafted to convince someone at a publishing company, probably a producer, to fund development of the game. The document should be attractive, easy to read, and upbeat about the idea. It should get the publisher excited about the game and at the same time show that you know your business.

Using Pictures in a Document

As a general rule, the more pictures you include in a design document, the better, especially if it's going to be used to sell the game. The game industry is extremely visually oriented, and pictures are what make executives, producers , marketing staff, and sales people sit up and take notice. The old clich about a picture being worth a thousand words holds true when you're trying to pitch a game to someone: You can save yourself a heck of a lot of talking with a single concept drawing. Consider including character sketches ; user interface diagrams; special type fonts; screenshots from your prototype, if you have one; and anything else that might please the eye and support your message. In the early stages, before you've had a chance to create any images of your own, search the Internet for "graphic scrap"pictures that give an idea of what you're hoping to accomplish.

Don't expect pictures to replace explanation, however. Every now and then, somebodyusually an artist or graphic designercreates a game design document that's almost all pictures, with only the vaguest description of the gameplay. The author clearly knows what he wants the player to see but has very little conception of what the player is going to do. Pictures can illustrate and clarify, but they can't show the heart of the game: the player's motivation, objectives, and actions. For that, you need words as well.

Protecting Your Rights

If your design documents are only for your own use, then all you need to do to protect them is lock them up. However, if you're going to give copies to potential publishers, developers, or investors, you should take some simple steps to protect your intellectual property:

• Clearly identify them as yours. Put your name on the title page and in the header or footer of each subsequent page. This ensures that even if the copy is taken apart for some reason, your ownership is recorded on every page.

• Include a statement that asserts that you own the copyright, in the form "Copyright <year> by <your name or company name>."

• If you don't want the document spread around, put "ConfidentialDo Not Redistribute" on the title page and in the header or footer of each page.

• Don't hand out copies to all and sundry unless you don't care who sees it or makes use of it. If it's important to you to control access to your ideas, make a record of the name and address of every person to whom you gave a copy.

• Request that the person or company that you want to show the document to sign a nondisclosure agreement (NDA) before you give it to them. An NDA is a very short contract in which no money changes hands. Instead, the signer promises to keep your document and other information confidential, in exchange for being allowed to see it. This is an extremely common business practice, and you can find many sample NDAs on the Internet. Consult a lawyer to adapt one to your own use.

It is extremely unlikely that a reputable publisher will steal your document and use it to make a game without paying you. Even so, it's important that you take steps to protect your intellectual property because if a dispute arises, you need to be able to demonstrate that you considered your work valuable and tried to prevent its uncontrolled dissemination .

About These Templates

In this appendix, we have provided templates for three types of design documents: the high-concept document , the treatment , and the design script (sometimes called a bible ). Each has a different function in the process of designing a game and pitching it to a publisher. However, the templates we're suggesting are by no means universal. Unlike Hollywood, which has had 80 years to work out a standard format for screenplays, there is no standard format for design documents in the game industry. Nor is there any rule about which ones you should create. Some developers might not bother to write high-concept documents at all, for example, and they might use other types of documents that we haven't discussed. It's up to you to determine what your project needs. You should feel free to adapt these templates any way you like, as long as the resulting document gets your message across and answers the questions in the reader's mind.