Designing a Design Document

The latest task was to create a Design Document with a group of students in the form of level layouts, written design documents, storyboards and construct a suitable and compelling storyline for the theme set by the lecturer.

This part of the process is enjoyable as this is where the ideas start getting created. The first week was just allowing everyone to come up with ideas they wanted to see that fit the design brief. Then once everyone had a huge list of ideas, we would sit down and discuss which of these would be possible to implement into the final product.

For this task, the role of design lead role for the project was naturally given to me as the team needed to be grounded on just how many ideas they could have in the final project. During this process everyone on the team wanted to do so many of the ideas that they came up with that it would of been impossible to create them within the short time period given for this project. The way this became solved was a simple check list of, 'Does this help the brief?'. Since the team was designing a game based on certain requirements, the ideas had to fit these criteria. Though the idea may have been good, it would be cut if it didn't answer this simple question with a 'Yes'.

Once the team was comfortable with the overall layout of the events the game will have the team would decide on what areas of the design document they would help flesh out before the team would got into the creation stage. However this is when the problems then started to appear for the group as meeting would be planned for certain lessons and students wouldn't appear for them due to illness or being late. This did cause a big problem as the team was split into different members that turned up designing the game and those that didn't doing the same thing. Trying to create a design document this way didn't help the process at all. Since changes were being made on a daily basis nobody seemed to know just what the game was going to look like in terms of story, design, gameplay, scripting, etc as each person seemed to have a different game they were designing.

Once the team finally got a meeting together, that is when the problems seemed to get themselves sorted out. Some ideas were cut in order to make sure everyone understood how the game should be created. It then a case of making sure we explained this process of how to create this game into the design document. Everyone had their own contribution to the document and it looks like the team has a clear vision on how to create this game come the New Year.