Players Making Decisions: Game Design Essentials and the Art of Understanding Your Players

28. Documentation and Written Communication

A design document never survives contact with the enemy.

—DAMION SCHUBERT

Game designer roles come in all shapes and sizes. The “traditional” game designer role is the one you see at big video-game studios: Designers manage and communicate the vision for a large team, often crafting levels and features themselves, but just as often they delegate to engineers and artists. Designers at small video-game studios also have to rely on documentation to solidify what are often ephemeral design ideas taken from conversations and playtesting. Analog game designers need documentation most of all: Almost all analog games ship with written rules.

One thing is certain: A designer cannot rely solely on verbal communication. ...