Wednesday 3 April 2019

Game design doc

Today I learned there is something called a "design doc" and I was browsing some examples of them. Some of them are "pitch" docs which are way too simple to accurately describe a game, but there were some that were more detailed. I've never made a design doc, maybe that's why Kaduria and my other projects took so much time to finish.

Maybe I could still write a design doc for Kaduria? I just don't see that much reason for it, but it could be something to try at least. I guess it is good to know what your game is going to have in terms of places, items, monsters etc. but why not just put them in the game without a doc? Maybe I'm missing something here.

I'm in a weird kind of situation right now, because all my projects are in state where I'm not sure what to do next, in a way. Obviously there is so much to fix that I can just start doing it and worry about those more generic things later.

Working on Banana Rogue (a derived project from Advanced Rogue) has actually given me some hope for my own programming style and source code. It makes everything look much simpler, even this huge project. The source code as technical aspect doesn't have too many problems to solve, it's more like content. Well, it's almost always the content. I don't know, maybe a design doc for content or more specific for game world could help me determine how to create the entire game world, not just some level themes.