6 February 2020 – 17 February 2020
I did a fair amount of research (see below) on ways different people make game design documents (GDD) so I could make THE ULTIMATE COMPREHENSIVE TEMPLATE to use for my current and future games. I liked what I ended up with and I figured other people could get some use out of it too. I hope you like it.
Sources used:
- Alex Sayenko’s How (and Why) to Write a Great Game Design Document – I began with this article and used it as a jumping off point to frame what I should and shouldn’t include in my template.
- New York Film Academy’s How to Write Your First Game Design Document – Another great article that I used as a starting point. It’s a great resource for getting in the right mindset for what you should include in a GDD.
- Benjamin “HeadClot” Stanley – A very well organized GDD on google docs which helped me frame the layout of mine. He also had the great idea to use <angle brackets> to indicate to the writer where they need to fill in information.
- Blaveloper – A nice, concise GDD that I found on the same thread as Benjamin’s.
- lhodgesdesign’s High Concept Game Document Template – An absolutely beautiful GDD that reads more like a graphic designer’s website than a technical document (which makes sense since it was made in InDesign). I didn’t think the layout was very scalable to games that didn’t use the exact same elements, but it did have a lot of great descriptive sections that were great to include. You can purchase it here if you want.
- Iron Belly Studios – A professional GDD that had some really useful elements I hadn’t considered before such as voice acting, minimum hardware specs, cinematics and promotional material.