Ultimate Game Design : Building game worlds

Building Game Worlds
242
U L T I M A T E G A M E D E S I G N
cohesive and easily digestible game design document. Some designers make the
mistake of writing huge, densely worded design documents that seem to fixate on
nonessential details, therefore making them very hard for anyone to read. Trust me
on this one—a busy programmer or artist is not going to spend whatever limited time
he or she has remaining in a cramped day poring over a badly written design document.
No one will bother.
Over time and exposure to development cycles, you begin to understand better exactly
which design details are useful and essential. These are the design details you
formalize into your design document and make available to your team on an intranet.
However, the writing, presentation, and communication skills don’t end with the
assembly of a design document. You will often find yourself presenting game design
ideas to a wide variety of audiences in person. You may be presenting development
team ideas to management teams hoping to secure a budget for development. You
may be presenting the results of your design synthesis efforts to your own team or to
other on-site developers. You may be “selling” your game development ideas to many
departments within a single company. Each of these endeavors requires the best writing
and verbal presentation skills you can muster. In some form or another, your job is
dependent on successfully selling your game design ideas.
We certainly know by now how critical and valuable scripting skills can be in
game development. It is well worth the effort and expense to get books like Python in
a Nutshell, by Alex Martelli (O’Reilly & Associates, 2003) or VBScript in a Nutshell,
by Paul Lomax, Matt Childs, and Ron Petrusha (O’Reilly & Associates, 2003) and
learn how to work with scripts. The more you can learn about scripting and demonstrate
in your scripting skills, the better.
Learning how to model precise and useable low-polygon models takes serious
time and effort. I’m always trying to get better at it, and sometimes I succeed. I’ve
spent many hours talking with a wide array of 3-D artists, and let’s face it: sitting in
front of some 3-D packages makes you feel like you’re trying to land the space shuttle.
3-D application interfaces have gotten better, but there’s still a long way to go in
making these applications easier to use.
If you’re brand new to 3-D, I suggest starting with a free program like Wings 3D
(www.wings3d.com). I find this application to be intuitive and surprisingly powerful
as a starting point in 3-D. It tends to focus on a more sculptural approach to model
building, as opposed to a never-ending series of face extrusions and scales, although
there is obvious power in that method too. I’m a big fan of Bay Raitt, whose work in
3-D applications like Nendo and Mirai predate Wings 3D. Figure 10-1 is an example
of a model Bay built to demonstrate his sculptural approach to modeling.
As you progress in your game design career, you may find yourself leading a design
team. I suggest that you get some pure production experience along the way.
Learning how to task and track assets, work effectively with a variety of developers,