Andrew Rollings and Ernest Adams on Game Design

Creating and Using Design Documents

Game design documents actually have two roles. Everyone is familiar with their development role: Design documents help a team of people to create a game. As we said in Chapter 1, “What Is Game Design?,” one of the stages of game design is communicating the design to others, and that's what design documents do. Even if you're developing a game all by yourself, it's useful to write down the things you've decided on, to make notes and lists of features that you want to include in the game.

Design documents also play a sales role. This doesn't mean selling the game to the public; it means selling the idea of the game to a publisher. The document is crafted to convince someone at a publishing company, probably a ...