Technical Design Document and

Game Design Document

This tutorial will discuss about the technical design document and game design
document to teach you how to narrate your technical features and elements that you will
put in your game. This lesson will introduce you to a technical design document and an
overall game design document along with the work involved in putting together the
technical plans in creating the game.

Object-Oriented Design
Modern digital games can be considered as large software projects which run and are
made up of thousands of lines of code to millions of lines of code. Object-Oriented
Design (OOD) came into existence to deal with large software projects. The GDD or
TDD are made keeping in mind all the demands of OOPs along with the implementation
details (TDD for technical details and GDD for entire Game Details) within it.

Technical Design Document(TDD)

The Technical Design Document provides a blueprint for the software engineers in your
team to implement and code the features of your game. The technical design document
will let your developers to specify - what are the requirements, how they should be
implemented, along with the tools and technologies required for the implementation. The
connection between structural design of a Software and Technical Design Document is
that the technical design document has a broader scope with less details, than a
software architecture diagram.
A TDD generally contains the following information:

1. List of all features.

2. Choice of Game engine
3. High level diagrams
4. Details about the 3D objects, terrain, scenes.
5. Use of Physics Engine
6. Game logic and artificial intelligence
7. Audio and Visual details and specifications
8. Networking
9. Delivery platform & hardware/software requirements for running the game on a
system.

Here we have a very good TDD example (designed by some students for their college
project): TDD Example

Game Design Document(GDD)

When anyone says that, "check in the design document", they basically refer to the
Game Design Document (GDD). This document gives a detailed explanation of all of the
game characters, the stages or levels, the game mechanics, the views and scenarios,
the storyline, various menus and options implemented etc for the game.
The game design document is part of a set of documents that specify the complete
details about the game you are creating. All of these documents, are collectively called
the production plan:

 Concept or Vision Document (Proposal)

 Artistic Design Document
 Technical Design Document
 Project Schedule
 Software Testing Plan
 Risk Mitigation Plan

The Game Design document can be internally divided into three sub-parts, where each
part of the document describes a special phase of the game project. It describes the
three development stages which are: from concept to design to production. These are:

Concept Document
The concept paper acts as a letter of proposal, where in the entire objective as well as
the tools and human resource requirement is planned. This helps to set out our goals
clearly (or the entire team) so that every one is on the same page.
It also acts as a sales tool for partners who will take the product to the market to sell and
publicize. During this stage you can also start working with a mini-prototype which will
give you an opportunity to experiment and revise your idea.
In this document information like: storyline narrative ,genre, target audience, most
compelling feature, cost, time for development etc are specified.

Design Document
In this game design document, there involves an active on-going discussion amongst
the artists, animators, sound engineers, and developers. These documents are very
often used for clearing confusions by adding comments, and sharing ideas etc as well.
The tools and softwarea that will be required for the designing and development of the
game are also written with proper budgeting.
Design document is to make sure the end product is just like you expected it to be.

Production Document
This is the final stage of the Game design document, where the production management
and developer's group work to create the final product. Mostly the game designers are
outsourced for some specific game design purpose only. Whereas the game production
team and game developers are purely-internal human resources of that company. This
phase also keep a detail about the number of developers as well as the work assigned
to them.
This document is full of Time management charts, task database, budget spreadsheets,
technical specifications etc.

Here we have a very good GDD example (designed by some students for their college
project): GDD Example