Games, Design and Play: A Detailed Approach to Iterative Game Design

Chapter 7. Game Design Documentation

To keep the iterative design process from feeling like an ever-shifting state of chaos, we use three kinds of documentation: design documents, schematics, and tracking spreadsheets. Design documents record the specific design decisions made about the game, including a game’s design values. Schematics illustrate how the design is manifest onscreen to make the abstract ideas of a game partially tangible before being implemented in a prototype. And the tracking spreadsheet captures big-picture and moment-to-moment tasks necessary to design, prototype, and playtest a game.

If all that happened during the iterative game design process was literally conceptualizing, prototyping, playtesting, and evaluating, the ...