Hello

GDD aka Game Design Document is an interesting topic if you are an indie developer. What do you or your team, which is consist of 2 or 3 of your friends will benefit from it? Does anybody will read it besides its authors? Why do you want to write down a bunch of stuff which might change in the future? In this blog post I try to explain these topics in my way and explain the goals what we wanted to achieve with our GDD.

What is a GDD?

Basically a well written GDD covers all topic about a game what is needed to recreate it. The goal of the game, the objects in the game, the original idea and topics what is it about, and a lot more.

If you check out some examples (I linked some in the end of this post), you can see that some of them are longer then others and the my first sentence is not entirely true. It’s because some game has multiple GDD and they covers the topics in various depth. It depends on various factors like the actual development maturity level of the game or the target audience of the exact document. A briefing document about a game idea for a publisher or deep technical description of a beta stage game are also considered as GDD just with different scopes and target audience.

What is similar in all type of GDD that it will contains ideas about a game what is decided by the game designer(s) and other specialists like artist or writers and it’s main goal is to give a coherent game to anybody who was not part of these conversations. In a big studio environment with a lot of people the benefits of a document like this is kinda obvious, but…

What can benefit from it a small indie studio?

Excellent question! And my short answer is to finalize ideas.

As an extended answer I can tell you that it can help to see the details of your game. Like how many model the game will need, how different is the playable character from the other NPC characters, or what kind of ui elements need to be implemented. If these things will be written down by your team it can make a lot of thing cleaner. During the process everybody can be on the same page about the game project and the team can see how big of a project it will be.

And yeah these kind of GDD is not a holy document approved by a higher power, so you can diverge from it whenever you see fit. Even big games GDDs have multiple versions.

I hope, I convince you that a GDD can be useful for your team, so…

Where to start it?

When we start to think about our GDD for Mechanical Destruction 9637 the first thing was to check out some template and other GDDs on the net. I personally don’t believe in templates so we rather make our own.

In the actual creation our first thing was to determine the main point what we wanted to touch in the document. The second step was to fill it with content together. And that’s it. You can say that I’m a little bit wage about this but in reality the main part is to talk trough all the points what you and your team included in to the main points of the document. During this process there will be a lot of question what is need to be answered or be agreed upon. And if your team can determine a common ground in all of these situations then you have a finished GDD. The final question after this is…

Where will it be useful?

If you want to involve another person in the development, give him/her the GDD. If you want to pitch your game for a publisher, give them the GDD. If you want to make some marketing lines, open up your GDD. If you are uncertain in any topic about the game or any other aspect of your life, then the GDD might have an answer for you as well!

Here are some example for you

• Original pitch of GTA > https://www.gamedevs.org/uploads/grand-theft-auto.pdf
• GDD of DeusEx > https://archive.org/details/DeusExDesignDoc11081997/mode/2up?view=theater
• The pitch of the first Diablo > https://web.archive.org/web/20160321082130/https://www.graybeardgames.com/download/diablo_pitch.pdf

I hope you enjoyed this one. Altough this is not about the actual game but I wanted to share some thoughts about this topic since we are working on a GDD right now.

~ Qnbie