Design Land: Creating Great Design Docs - Extra Credits Video Games

Design documents! One of the most important things you can create for your video game. However, getting it right can be troublesome! Design docs don't only convey information to different groups but also retain all your gaming info. If it's done well it can provide your team with a straight path to follow to success!

End formula for fun1 (angled brackets aren't allowed in descriptions lol):
IF: - FAITHVALUE * RAND(0-100) greater than 1000
THEN: CRISISOFCONSCIENCE

End formula for fun 2:
RULERRESPECT = RULERRESPECT+
((FAITH/100)*FAITHVALUEINCREASE)

--- More from Design Land ---
4. Meaning Into Math: Coming Soon!

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♪ Outro Music: "Dreaming in Pixels" by Tiffany Roman

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[NochSoEinKaddiFan]

This is litterally all design work under the sun, even mechanical engineering. What you have outlined here needs to get implemented into all industries that develop anything immediately!

[ericdillingham]

"Design Land" sounds like a term for your mind when you're high.

[ronaldoakes]

Ancient software engineer here: I’ve never worked on a video game (except for my project for my computer graphics class as an undergrad last century). However, I can state that much of this advice applies to many other software projects as well.

[REXanadu]

First time I've seen someone in the games industry positively advocate for making a design doc AND lay out specific things to aim for when doing so

[locked_lunatic]

6:25 1) If the FaithValue is too low it can trigger a CrisisOfConscience event. This can start happening at negative 10 FaithValue, increasing in likelihood fast at first and slowly later. At negative 20 Faithvalue it has a 50% chance to trigger.
2) This is an assignment. You increase RulerRespect by a value that's proportional to Faith and FaithValueIncrease. Dividing by 100 is just done to get the value into the desired range.

[ChaosDX]

I'm the programmer on a game design team (that is just hobby-level and not at all professional) and it took me a week to convince the project leader that we needed a design document. And even then it didn't get made until I got tired of waiting and made it for them based on meeting notes and used examples of features I saw in other games with a giant asterisk saying "This is just an example. I don't know if this game will have spells and MP. Please edit." (Months later, that asterisk is still unedited.) Yes, I do have to hunt the project leader down every time I program a feature to ask them for details not mentioned in the untouched document. I am sending them this video.

[shawnheatherly]

Even just for designing characters, a document to keep all their lore and references handy is so nice.

[Okhanian]

It's indeed very important to stablish a common language for our game D. documentation, some times it may feel you (as the designer) are being a bit of a pain in the ass for your teammates, but it is well worth it to avoid confusions in the near and distant future!

[IncubusGamer]

"Publisher will let us" is a piece of a phrase that has lodged itself in the darkest corners of my mind and has not let up from the start to the finish of this video.

[KapouehKanard]

A few tricks from my esperiences
- have a template, and try to follow it
- on the template have few introductory sections about the context, the design problem we are to solve, the constrains etc
- mark the deprecated document in the title or the 1st line.
- add an FAQ section where you put the recurring questions and the edge cases that ppl might get confused about
- put links to the documentation of other crafts related to the topic (art mood board, prices spreadsheet, back end flow diagrams etc).
- if your documentation tool doesn't have this built-in, add a last update date and author.

[LORDOFDORKNESS]

A great example on a design bible I'd recommend tracking down as an example to follow, is the My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic one.
Not even kidding. It's got some really good illustrations, easy to follow layout & chapters, rules on world-building, initial character arcs. You can get a decent grasp of what the entire show is meant to be about, without even watching a single episode.
I've genuinely seen art & background books made for consumer level sale on other franchises that held half the quality of that thing.

[GaleTheSpark]

QOTV:
1) If you lose faith in something, this could randomly result in a crisis of conscience

2) How much respect you have for a ruler is determined by how much you respect them as a person, and how much faith you have in them, and as your faith in them grows, so too does respect?

[cedah]

In my experience, the most important way to start your design doc is to outline your design goals. How do you want the player to feel? What function does this product, or piece of the product, serve?
Without establishing your shared goals, design docs can become immune to review - it will outline HOW xyz should work, but not WHY we should put time into xyz in the first place, giving readers the impression that each documented decision is "final" and doesn't need to be questioned.
Always establish your goals and justify how each decision works to achieve those goals. If you can't do that, work the design until you can!

[abbierobinson]

Bullet points are your friend.
A paragraph can sometimes include multiple ideas or systems and picking them out from word walls can be difficult.
Correct grammar doesn't matter as much as ease of reading.

[Exevan]

While i don't work as a game developer i'm still very tempted to send this video to a few of the software analysts at my job. It's an absolute nightmare how much knowledge about a project gets fragmented when nobody knows how to write a half decent design document ;_;

[jonny.f]

Im glad extra credit used NFTs as an example of a terrible idea.

[Davidushey]

1) is a bolean call to a trigger. The game takes a the negative faith value, multiplies it by 100, and if that's greater than 1000, it triggers the condition / event: crisis of concience.

2) is calculating a system value for a ruler's respect likely on the clock, where the previous respect is added to the faith value/100 times the modifier.

[BlankPicketSign]

Example one: The Character has a random chance to have a "Crisis of Conscience", when their "-FaithValue" seems to be 10 or above.

Example two: A Ruler's Respect can increase faster the more of the Faith stat that ruler has. More Faith means more Respect.

[Heightren]

1) You're rolling whether the character will have a crisis of conscience. However, the threhold seems to be quite high, so it seems unlikely to happen unless they have a FV < (-10000). You must've had a massive loss in faith for a crisis of conscience.
2) You're evolving how much respect there is for a ruler, depending on the amount of faith the character has. If your faith increases you'll respect the ruler more and viceversa.

[TheRealE.B.]

(*Cries in hopelessly disorganized office with horribly unproductive meetings.*)