Features

Game Design: Secrets of the Sages
Creating Characters, Storyboarding, and Design Documents

Alex Garden, Relic Entertainment

The young game designer responsible for Homeworld and Sigma: The Adventures of Rex Chance talks about the importance of a design document and how to best tackle one.

A design document is a road map for a team tasked with creating your wacky idea. Members of your team should be able to reference your design document when they have questions. Practically speaking, game design is a somewhat organic process though, so the design document has to be somewhat organic as well to keep people informed correctly. At Relic, we have one mega, central design document that's used as the basis of the game; then we supplement it with "Design Updates" that are much shorter and easier to update.

How important is storyboarding a game today?

Considering the cost and complexity of cinematic and animatic sequences, it's critically important to do as much pre-production as you can (which is relatively cheap) before you start working on full product (which is very, very expensive). Planning may look like a waste of time, but it is in fact the single easiest and cheapest way to make your game good in the end.

Bruce C. Shelley, Ensemble Studios

Ensemble Studios designer Bruce Shelley—whose Age of Empires computer games have become one of the most successful real-time strategy games on the planet—offers his advice on using design documents:

The design document (DD) is the blueprint of the game design. It begins with a short paragraph or a long vision statement that sums up what the game is about. This is followed by a longer two- or three-page vision document, which provides more detail on the look and feel of the game. This grows into a full-blown DD that may reach several hundred pages for one of our games. All major systems have separate chapters that explain in detail how each system will work. For example, in the Age of Empires games, the DDs had a chapter on buildings. Here we listed all the buildings, their functions, their costs, their prerequisites, when they could be built, their attributes (hit points, armor), etc. Everyone on the project could go to that part of the DD to see how a particular building was supposed to work. From this document, the programming team would create their technical design document, which would list all the programming tasks, who was assigned to them, and estimates of creation time. The art team builds a list of art components from the DD. The test team builds its list of systems to be tested. The publisher compares the DD to the build they receive. The DD is the backbone of the development process. It's a living document, updated regularly. We keep it on our intranet so it's easily available to all. We also create a "DD Lite" that someone can read more easily for a quick overview of the product.

Phil Steinmeyer, PopTop Software

The creator of Railroad Tycoon, Tropico, and others says there are all kinds of design documents, so it's important to clarify the differences between them:

[They can] range from publisher summaries, which can be 1–10 pages, to general game design documents, running 15–50 pages, to detailed technical architecture documents listing every bit of code and art asset that will be needed by the game (sometimes running 1,000 pages and more).

Steinmeyer says he typically writes and follows two design documents. The first is a short summary for his publisher, highlighting projected marketing, budget, sales, and competing games. The second is a longer document for internal use.

For Tropico, it was about 40 pages of text, plus lots of spreadsheets. My team has complained that the Tropico design document wasn't detailed enough, and it wasn't kept up to date, so I'm going to try for more detail and keeping it up better on our next game.

Phil Saunders, Presto Studios
Earlier in this chapter we heard from Tim Schafer, best known for his games when employed by Lucas Arts, and now we have Phil Saunders from Presto Studios to chat further about design docs and storyboarding in adventure games.

"In our process, storyboarding is really only used for cinematic sequences where we're in complete control of the player's viewpoint," begins Saunders. He continues:

In environments that are fully realized and navigable, the important part of pre-production is prototyping. We create simple models early on in the process to define the path and to show what will and won't be visible to the player in any given location. At this stage, we're able to discover what players will and won't learn, and when; what we can hide from them; as well as what's revealed. As an additional benefit, prototyping allows us to have a good grasp of the size and scope of our production. We can tell what level of detail must be put into what part of the environment, based on its distance and accessibility to the player.

Why this amount of effort?

We've learned the hard way that preliminary planning pays off in the end. It's sad to see someone's designs being cut from the game because you've run out of time, or technically it just won't work. For Myst III: Exile, we spent about a year developing the gameplay, story, and early visual ideas. At the end of about 11 months, we had a design document 160 pages long. The design document saves you from over designing and eventually cutting out work that took someone months to prepare. Months that could have been better spent fine-tuning other areas.

Is a design document necessary? "In my opinion," concludes Saunders, "it's the most important part of production."

For more about the creation of Myst III: Exile and what could be learned from it, hop back to Chapter 3.

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Tørnquist, Gilbert, and Greenberg

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