Ultimate Game Design : Building game worlds

A P P E N D I X D
for a third-person action title differently than I would set up a document for a racing
game. However, one similarity among design document formatting that I tend to
carry with me is the use of a left-hand sidebar with a list of topics that loads information
on the subject selected into a main “frame” view. This seems to work nicely and
allows developers to rapidly find specific design details by subject with very little effort
on their part.
You need to give your development team design information quickly and effectively.
Artists and animators need to know how characters should be constructed,
should be textured, and are supposed to move. AI programmers need to know how
characters are expected to behave by instance. Virtually everyone needs to know
something about intended use for an item, and its feature specifics.
If you bury this content deep into a document that can be used as a weight set, it
will be lost on your team. I format my design documents differently depending on the
kind of game the design document will be created to serve. I try my best to get information
to everybody in easily comprehensible bites of blatant information. Use tables.
Use summaries. Use simple bullet lists. Don’t make people dig.
As I mentioned, I write it all up in HTML using long sidebars that load information
into an associated frame. You can simply look down the left-hand sidebar and get
any information you want by topic selection quickly and easily. “What does that
thing do again?” wonders an artist or programmer. Click. “Oh, yeah!”
QUICK MODELING
Depending on your team structure, you may be doing plenty of modeling as a designer,
or next to none at all. At the very least, it’s best to be able to make temporary models
so that you can start to try things out before final models are completed by your
artists. Having basic modeling skills is important, and they too will grow over time
and exposure.
You will have a basic polygon budget for each major category of required assets
established for you by your technical team. Start throwing in your temporary props,
temporary environmental details, and temporary characters! Your characters might
have roughly 1500 polygons available each for construction. If your game has 30
characters, you’ve just spent 45,000 polygons! Props might average 300–500 polygons.
Arena or environmental budgets are much higher and are dependent on several other
factors. Be sure to collaborate early with your technical team to make these numbers
available to your team.
Don’t wait for final art! Model it up, even if it’s ugly, and get it in there! Get things into
the game and moving around early rather than late. Start finding out as soon as possible
as many details as you can about what is and isn’t working. You will save time in your art
production by using temporary models to discover a wide array of problems.
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Quick Topic Summary for Designers