Nigel Kershaw, Game Designer at Deep Silver: Game Design Documents, Woo

Nigel Kershaw, Game Designer at Deep Silver, dropped in today to give a talk on what a game designer actually does. It was interesting to hear about this topic, as it’s such a broad job description.

According to Nigel, a game designer ‘defines, communicates and creates play’. Defining play is thinking of a game and how it plays/it’s mechanics. You create ideas in an organised fashion and discuss theme and agency behind it.

Communicating play is being able to explain this game to the other games professions; coders need to know mechanics, artists need theme and feeling, and marketers need unique selling points (USPs) and hooks. From Nigel’s point of view, this is the most important job for a designer.

One of the best ways to communicate your is through a game design document (GDD). A GDD is basically a compendium of everything to do with your game that people can look back to to see where they are in the grand scheme of things. Commonly a GDD is a tedious task, resulting in 30 or so pages of writing and tables that no one wants to write or read, but is necessary for most larger scale project. Nigel continued to remind us that the GDD does not represent the final game, and should be changed through iteration during development.

Abby Friesen, Game Designer, has told Gamasutra of her methods for creating a GDD that isn’t “soul-sucking”, but one that people can actually read without wasting their time.

The first thing she recommends using a program that can easily be updated and is navigable rather than your standard word-software.

We should also define terminology; Abby gives an example of people referring to levels as different things, such as levels, missions and puzzles. Due to not defining terms, her team had to run back and forth to actually understand what people were trying to talk about, wasting development time.

Thirdly, Abby suggests establishing ownership. “To preserve order, I am the only one who edits/adds to/removes from the design docs. It keeps everything in one voice, ensures proper use of terminology, and helps me know exactly what’s in there and where it all is at all times. I serve as the funnel through which the team’s ideas flow into written form.”

Creating play is implementing all of this, and, as Nigel put it, ‘knob twiddling’; playing with what engines you have to create the game that you set out to develop.

References:

Friesen, A. (2014). Writing a GDD your team can actually use. Available: http://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/AbbyFriesen/20141006/227048/Writing_a_GDD_your_team_can_actually_use.php. Last accessed 10th May 2015.