the purpose of a GDD

What is a GDD and what is its purpose

A GDD or a Game Design Document is a document used during the development of a game to document its design, features and all other things about the game.

What is the overall purpose?

A GDD is used by groups of people to help explain aspects of a game that is under development and can help communicate to other people working on the project who may not be able to communicate face to face.

Why is it essential?

A GDD is essential for creating a game because it allows convenient access to what the game need's and what has already been done.

How does it help guide the progress of a game under development?

It can help guide the development progress because it shows what has been done and what has already been done

How does a GDD present its content

A typical GDD will have different sections that highlight specific things about a game, in most GDDs they will have a large amount of clarification surrounding what page is for what prepose, some pages in a GDD may contain information about certain things such as

• Sounds
• Design
• Items
• Other

GDD's typically can clarify things and separate things from other things, this is so that nobody gets confused whilst reading the GDD.

Use and Maintenance

As the game progresses through its development, certain thing might need to be changed in the GDD to help others understand that the game may have changed direction.

How can a GDD be used as a living document that evolves throughout development?

A GDD can be used to track the progress of a game due to the previous documents still being visible to anybody working on the game, this allows the developers to track the progress and adjust the game that might be needed.

How can a GDD be used to measure progress and identify potential issues

A GDD can be used to detect potential issues due to the GDD having documents on everything that is intentional, this means that if something happens that isn't on the GDD then the development team can fix it. A GDD can also be used to measure progress for the same reason because you can see what is completed, what isn't and what might be a bug.

Benefits and Challenges of using a GDD

benefits

Benefits of using a GDD is that you can communicate across long distances with minimal effort, this help to communicate with people who might work at a different office, or somebody how might work from home.

Challenges

A Challenge of using a GDD is that there could be language barriers, or somebody might have troubles reading which would make it harder to use the GDD, in this case it would be easier to speak face to face.

How can these challenges be overcome?

you could have separate copies in different languages based on what your team need, also you could help people with eye problems by having face to face meeting sometimes.

Who are GDDs for

GDDs are Designed for game developers and people who work in big game development companies, this is so people can communicate and have a list of things that need to be done.

How can a GDD attract investors or publishers?

A good GDD can help attract people like investors or publishers because if a game looks good enough, people are going to want to invest into your game so they can earn mor profit and the better your GDD looks, the earlier you can attract investors.