The tale of a game designer
Welcome back to another Magic Writer design blog post! This week is the last one and I'll be writing a more overarching post about our teams design document.
I'm the lead designer for magic writer, and in the early stages of our project I was the sole designer. I tasked myself with writing the whole design document and doing all the design work. This turned out to be much harder than expected, and later on we would collaborate on design work both the creative kind and the writing-the-document kind.
This blog's artifact: The Design Document
From Magic Writer concept document
Document from scratch
In the beginning we used a template which we recieved from our teacher in the beginning of the course. This template contained titles to be included and questions to be answered under the titles. The titles were:
States & Modes
GUI
Avatar
Controls
Enemies/Traps
Power-Ups
Level Design
Rules
MDA
From these as a starting point, we started filling out our concept document.
States & Modes
The aim of states and modes is to have a list of every mode/state in your game and how they flow between them looks like.
We do this with a brief explanation of each mode and show the paths they can take. The picture below is used to clear up the flow.
Picture made by Semih Parlayan
GUI
The GUI or Graphical User Interface section of the document should explain what kinds of design is used to deliver information to the player, things like health, score, and ammunition.
Our first edition of the GUI section used this image together with an explanation of each individual GUI part.
Mockup made by Simon Lundgren(that's me)
Originally from Magic Writer concept document
This worked well getting the point across. One of the biggest strenghts of our design document was that we used old mockups with modification to quickly get the design on paper and picture. Later on we also added this picture to show a new design.
Mockup made by Semih Parlayan
Avatar
In the avatar section, you explain what the playable character is and how they behave in the game.
Here we only used the image below and a couple of lines of text to explain how the wizard was like.
From Magic Writer concept document
This section could have more pictures to explain a bit clearer about the details, but I think we managed to get the idea and design through with words.
Controls
In controls you explain how you control the game, simply.
We had this image below and a list of every button.
Mockup made by me
Simple.
Enemies/Traps
In this section you list all details regarding enemies.
This section is very important in Magic Writer, since our weakness system is a core part of our gameplay. The first iteration had a list of everything about the monsters and then a weakness spreadsheet. Later on we cut the list shorter and added visual representations.
Art by Andre Bengtsson
Power-ups
In the power-ups section you list the powerups in the game and whatever surrounds them.
In this we simple listed every powerup with a image and their effects. Later on we also added the explanation on how their timer works.
Art from Magic Writer Concept Document
Level Design
Level design is here.
In the beginning the only thing we wrote was 5 different ways we could adjust the difficulty and pushed the task to a later date. Later on we realized that no one had done level design and things got annoying to figure out in the midst of programming. Later on when this work was done, the level design was recorded and pushed in.
No image for this one :(
Rules
Rules are for win/lose condition, score calculation and everything extra about the game.
In rules we also simply listed off the things that hadn't already explained or had no better place to be in. This section did not go through any change, since it's pretty straightforward even without pictures.
MDA
MDA or Mechanics Dynamics Aesthetics are supposed to be your design goals.
Here we copied the Magic Writer concept document MDA. They were pretty much on the same page as us.
Summary
This was our structure for our design document. In afterthought, we should have had more pictures from the start. We should also have included an intro paragraph where we explained the gameplay. Other than that, we actually got pretty positive feedback from our design document.
This blog post was pretty rushed, sorry about that!
I hope you liked this tour of Magic Writer design and tune in next week for another design related blog post.
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