Get Game Design Form

A Game Design Document is the blueprint for how to build your game. It outlines your plans for characters, environments, gameplay, levels, visual style, and much more. But they're often written as long text documents that end up collecting dust. Modern Game Design Documents are visual, collaborative, and lightweight.

A game design document (GDD) is a software design document that serves as a blueprint from which your game is to be built. It helps you define the scope of your game and sets the general direction for the project, keeping the entire team on the same page. Use this GDD template.

A Technical Design Document (TDD) is written by the development team and describes the minute detail of either the entire design or specific parts of it, such as: The signature of an interface, including all data types/structures required (input data types, output data types, exceptions)

A design doc — also known as a technical spec — is a description of how you plan to solve a problem. There are lots of writings already on why it's important to write a design doc before diving into coding. So all I'll say here is: A design doc is the most useful tool for making sure the right work gets done.

A basic game design document might include: Design pillars. Main features & mechanics. Target platform & target audience. Interface & controls.

For a simple hyper-casual game, 3-5 pages might be enough. But if you've taken up the implementation of something more global, with a large number of levels, storylines, features, and screens, the document will significantly grow. The main thing is to describe everything accurately, not beautifully.

How to structure a game project Figure out some principles. Make a few rules. Follow the rules (and make others follow them). Clean up from time to time. Review principles and rules from time to time and adjust as necessary.