(6) TWO TYPES OF GAME DESIGN

1. What is Game Design?
2. The Design Document
3. Why the “It’s in My Head” Technique Isn’t Good
4. The Two Types of Designs
5. A Fill In Design Document Template
6. A Sample Game Design: Space Invaders
7. Rules of Game Design

The Two Types of Designs

Even if there isn’t an official distinction between design types, separating the design process into two types makes it easier to understand what techniques are more advantageous to the games you are developing.

Mini Design

The mini design is the sort of design you can do in about a week or so, that features a complete, but general, description of the game.

A mini design document should be enough for any team member to pick it, read it, get the same idea of the game as the designer but be allowed to include a little bit of her own ideas on the game (like the artist designing the main character or the programmer adding a couple of features like cloud movement or parallax scrolling).

Mini designs are useful when you are creating a small game or a game that is heavily based on another game or very known genre. Some distinctive aspects of a mini design document are:

• General overview of the game
• Game goals
• Interaction of player and game
• Basic menu layout and game options
• Story
• Overview of enemies
• Image theme
  

Complete Design

The complete design document looks like the script from Titanic. It features every possible aspect of the game, from the menu button color to the number of hit points the barbarian can have. It is usually designed by various people, with help from external people like lead programmers or lead artists.

This kind of design is almost strict to it. It takes too much time to make, to be ignored or misinterpreted. Anyone reading it should see exactly the same game, the same colors and backgrounds as the designer(s).

These kinds of designs are reserved for big companies that have much money to spare. Small teams or lone developers should stay away from this type of design since most of the time they don’t have the resources to do it.
Some of the aspects a complete design should have are:

• General overview of the game
• Game goals
• Game story
• Characters’ story and attributes
• NPCs attributes
• Player/NPCs/Other rule charts
• All the rules defined
• Interaction of player and game
• Menu layout and style and all game options
• Music description
• Sound description
• Description of the levels and their themes and goals

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