As our final guest lecture, we had Sophie Artimegi, an award-winning games designer that also happens to be an artist in residence and lecturer at WSA. She has also done independent work on games such as Heroglobin, Hookup, Zellige, and On Suicide.

She gave us a talk on creating an effective GDD, and presented to us that it should ideally be split into 3 parts: an overview, breakdown (detailing parts of the game like gameplay, visuals/art, level design, narrative, and audio design) and a final section on project management.

A good GDD should go into strong detail, and tell developers exactly what they need to do and how long development will take. It should also include lots of diagrams and references to make sure everyone has the same mental image.

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Overview

Needs to contain:

• Elevator pitch
• Elaboration on;
  • Characters
  • Setting
  • Levels
  • Gameplay
• Make it ADHD friendly – bold and/or underline important points!

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Gameplay

• Does your programmer know what to build?
• What are the smaller components of each system?
• Include references from other games.
• Include gameplay loop diagrams!!

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Visuals

• Concept – 2D or 3D? Stylised or Realistic? What’s the perspective?
• Characters – How do they fit in with narrative or mechanics?
• Environment – How does it fit in with level design?

Be very precise!!

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Level Design

• What’s the context of level design in your game?
• Diagrams, maps, etc.
• Tutorial? How do you get through the learning curve?

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Narrative

• Linear vs Branching
• Is there a distinct dialogue style?
• Cutscenes?
• How do you convey different choices?
• What dialogue system are you using?

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Audio

• What audio assets will be needed?
  • Make a list!!
• What’s the inspiration? REFERENCES.
• Where are you sourcing them from?

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I also got the chance to talk to Sophie afterwards about my project; she thought it was really compelling, but would require a lot of planning work, more than usual for a project of this calibre. I really valued the talk that was given by Sophie and will be making good use of it as I begin work on my GDD in the coming weeks.