How to write a Game Design Document
Game Developer
AUGUST 15, 2023
Game Design Documents (GDD) have a long history and a different place in many designers' toolboxes. Here's how to write a useful, up-to-date GDD.
design how-to-write-a-game-design-document 
Zoochosis by Clapperheads will make you fear those lovely animals in the zoo
PreMortem.Games
APRIL 22, 2024
Welcome to the unsettling world of Zoochosis by indie game studio Clapperheads. The teaser trailer of the game, which featured a heavily mutated giraffe scurrying over the enclosure, received over 10 million views across YouTube. The game has since gathered well over 200.000 wishlists on Steam. And well, you see the result.”
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Jussi Kemppainen is exploring AI-assisted game development with Echoes of Somewhere
PreMortem.Games
AUGUST 30, 2023
With the discussions over the use of AI in game development raging on, Jussi-Petteri Kemppainen , Lead VFX Artist at Mainframe Industries and founder of Dinosaurs Are Better , spends his spare time to see what all the fuss really is about. AI affects game design The project’s trajectory shifted with the integration of AI tools.
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Brok the InvestiGator is the first Punch&Click game “Indies need to be innovative”
PreMortem.Games
APRIL 24, 2023
It took Fabrice Breton, a French solo developer at CowCat Games , 6 years to create Brok the InvestiGator. He created what he calls the first ‘Punch & Click game’, combining a classic adventure with beat ’em up and RPG elements. There’s no easy part when it comes to game development”, he says. “So
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The Definitive Guide to Game Development: A Step-by-Step Process
iXie gaming
DECEMBER 2, 2022
Have you had an excellent game idea but not sure where to start? Or are you an experienced game developer who’s looking to grow the knowledge you already have? The process of game development is a unique experience. What is Game Development? Game development is the process of creating games.
A day in the life of a narrative designer
Game Global
JULY 12, 2021
What is Narrative Design? Do you want to make people laugh at the silly things the game’s troops say if you click on them enough times? If so, you probably want to be a game writer. If so, you probably want to be a game writer. When you imagine doing this job, is it mostly about crafting amazing cutscenes?
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How to Make Board Game Rules
Brand Game Development
SEPTEMBER 24, 2019
This week while working on my current board game design, a lot of things have come into focus. Now it’s time to start tweaking board game rules. This is where board game design often becomes very tricky. Need help on your board game? The rule book is a document meant to teach players how to play.
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Usually I am working solo but I am going to work in a studio as game designer and I would like to make good design documents for the team. So what does a design document for a feature/puzzle/challenge etc look like? What information should I include? And thank you for sharing your answers to all these questions we ask!
Ask a Game Dev
MARCH 2, 2023
Remember, the goal when writing a design document is to help provide a road map for the feature or system you’re working on. When I write a design document, I usually try to address the following: High level goal - What is this feature/system/puzzle/etc. supposed to do? supposed to do?
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How making 12 games in 12 months changed Cukia Kimani’s life
PreMortem.Games
JULY 21, 2023
In early 2021, Cukia Kimani , co-founder of South Africa’s renowned studio Nyamakop , and a close-knit circle of four friends embarked on an extraordinary challenge that involved making 12 games in 12 months. He recalls booting it up and as soon as he saw the magic within, asking his mum if people create games for a living.
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Tell Your Artist What You Want – Making Good Art Specs
Brand Game Development
JUNE 2, 2017
Dev Diary posts are made to teach game development through specific examples from my latest project: Highways & Byways. Great art is one of the most critical parts of a board game. As game developers, we have only a handful of tools at our disposal to help teach players what a game is about and how to play it.
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The importance of a game design document & how to create one – part 1
The Knights of Unity
FEBRUARY 5, 2021
Never underestimate the power of a design document. In the first one, we will list the most important reasons why you should create at least an outline of the fundamental features and mechanics you want to have your game. Design document in a personal project. Design document in the internal project.
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Video Game Engineers: Job Description and Salary
Game Designing
MARCH 1, 2023
Video game engineers are an important part of a game development team who takes care of a range of advanced technical tasks. Due to the skills required, becoming a game engineer can take some time and education, but it can also be a very well-paying job. Game Engineer vs Developer or Designer?
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Performing a Board Game Autopsy: Learning from Your Mistakes
Brand Game Development
OCTOBER 30, 2017
A business autopsy is when you use evidence to determine why and how a project failed. Need help on your board game? Join my community of over 2,000 game developers, artists, and passionate creators. Performing a board game autopsy is scary because it requires you to look long and hard at your failures.
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Screen Time Debate: Puffs or Broccoli?
Game Design Aspect
SEPTEMBER 5, 2022
In this article, game designer Sande Chen delves into the parental guilt associated with app usage, as documented in the book, Baby, Unplugged. Hope you're having a good holiday and not working :) In the previous months, I've been following up on research about kid games, especially those for the preschool set.
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Making a Game Plan
Brand Game Development
DECEMBER 23, 2016
When I refer to “making a game plan”, I don’t mean a plan to create a board game. I mean a game plan for tackling big, hairy audacious goals. How do you go from a big dream like “I want to create a successful board game” to reality? Need help on your board game? Write your goal at the top. Sell cards.
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How Ontario Plans to Integrate Coding into the Curriculum
Real Programming
JULY 28, 2022
Let’s dive into the changes in Ontario’s curriculum set for 2022 to see how students in grades 1-8 will embrace the STEM skills and foundational cognitive abilities that have always been at the heart of RP4K. The government claims students will learn how to code beginning in the first grade. What exactly are kids learning? Heading “A2.1”
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Updating Extwee with mocking console warnings using Jest
Digital Ephemera
JANUARY 17, 2024
This has meant returning to how I was testing different input and, accidentally, learning more about console testing in the framework I use named Jest. While I thought my work on Extwee would temporarily end with its newer 2.2.0 When it comes to compilation and the production of an output format, however, the rules are strictly enforced.
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Snowman Dev Update (2.2: May 2022)
Digital Ephemera
MAY 28, 2022
” Snowman was originally designed by Chris Klimas before Twine 2 was released. The first step, I decided, was to switch it over from a partial object-oriented design into a full one. Expectations that are, because of how Twine works, mostly left up to story format authors to fill at the moment. Was it back in 2020?
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Fractal time: Announcing Lyapunovia’21
Jesper Juul
MAY 19, 2021
My later life has become something else – writing books about video game theory, occasionally making games, and continually teaching students to make, think, and write about video games. Fractal time: Here’s Lyapunovia’21, a remake of my 1992-93 (yes) Amiga program of the same name. Me in 1992.
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Unity vs. Unreal: What to Choose for Your Game? | Moonmana
Moonmana
APRIL 7, 2023
If you’ve ever wondered what the best game engine is, we invite you to figure it out with us. Unity versus Unreal – this seems to be an ever-lasting battle in the game development world. Having been the market leaders for years, these two are the main candidates for the title of the best game engine. What is Unity?
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Why the Highways & Byways Kickstarter Campaign Crashed & Burned
Brand Game Development
APRIL 13, 2018
After a year of documenting the Highways & Byways development process through the Dev Diary, this is not the post I wanted to write. I would have much preferred to write a post about how Highways & Byways funded on day 1. Need help on your board game? That means the highs and the lows.
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Godot docs improvements report
Mircosoft Game Dev
DECEMBER 3, 2020
As such, I got to do a mix of reviews, editing, writing new content, and maintenance. We haven't back-ported them to the "stable" documentation yet as there are over 100 pages to redirect. I read the manual from start to finish and took notes about the parts that needed edits, a re-write, to move, or that were missing.
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Darner's Digest, vol. 3: on the Yarn Spinner v2.0 release + a YS primer
Radiator Blog
JANUARY 16, 2022
How to use Yarn Spinner 4. related: Yarn "language" spec , a programming specification / standard for how Yarn should operate in any game engine Yarn Spinner Unity plugs the core into Unity and adds a convenient wrapper. You will need to mod this and personalize it for your unique game project. for Unity release.
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About Godot 4, Vulkan, GLES3 and GLES2
Mircosoft Game Dev
JULY 17, 2021
The renderer design and all resulting code had to be re-implemented entirely from scratch in order to support Vulkan and modern rendering techniques. This hardware does not posses enough video memory to run a modern game engine, anyway. As the alpha of Godot 4.0 Will Godot 4.0 support OpenGL/OpenGL ES? One of our main goals for the 4.x
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Godot Showcase - Friday Night Funkin' VR developer talks about his experience
Mircosoft Game Dev
JANUARY 22, 2022
This week, we interviewed Ben Kurtin about his experience developing and releasing a VR recreation of the hit rhythm game Friday Night Funkin'. I've made several games in the past couple of years, with projects ranging from a simple 2D platformer to the very VR rhythm game being showcased here; and that was all done while I was self-taught.
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Year 10 of the Cogmind
Grid Sage Games
DECEMBER 22, 2023
In previous years I’ve opened the review with a collage of dev images of varying themes and content, but approaching the end of this year we have one major theme that stands out, and that I’ll be writing more about below, so let’s hear it for the interface mockups! Numbers go up. The dip below 1.0
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Creating a Build Environment on AWS with Incredibuild
AWS Games
NOVEMBER 23, 2022
Game developers often need to compile large amounts of C++ code, which requires lots of CPU resources, and developers also need to process other types of heavy compute tasks such as; shader compilation, rendering, asset creation, image conversion, lightmap baking and more. So, how can we do this and with what type of solution?
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Results of the Godot Jam - June 2018
Mircosoft Game Dev
JULY 2, 2018
After three days of intensive game development and two weeks of playtesting and rating (over 3,500 ratings!), we now have the results for our June 2018 Godot Community Game Jam ! 110 participants developed games with Godot Engine on the theme TEMPERATURE. All games can be downloaded from the itch.io Fire and Fondness.
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When Your Cute Little Game Business Suddenly Explodes
The Bottom Feeder
JANUARY 18, 2023
The big, fun news in the gaming world recently was that it looked like Wizards of the Coast (WotC for short, owned by Hasbro) was going to drastically change the Open Gaming License for Dungeons & Dragons. It's a really incomprehensible, inside-baseball story, but it's also really interesting if you're into games or business.
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We need your help to improve our documentation system!
Mircosoft Game Dev
AUGUST 30, 2017
About Godot Documentation. Like many other mainstream projects, Godot uses the Sphinx doc generator graciously hosted on ReadTheDocs for its documentation. To give an overview of the architecture: Documentation is written in reStructuredText in a GitHub repository. Those are: Headings show in the TOC Tree.
Schedule for GodotCon 2020 in Brussels
Mircosoft Game Dev
JANUARY 26, 2020
As usual, this GodotCon will follow the FOSDEM which also takes place in Brussels, and where we'll have a Godot stand as well as a few Godot-related talks in the Game Development devroom which some of us co-organize. This talk will show how this technique works and how to implement it in Godot. GodotCon schedule.
Fill in the blank in the class reference
Mircosoft Game Dev
APRIL 26, 2016
But there's one thing that we should not be idly waiting for: API documentation. The good news is, contributing to the class reference is quite easy; it's a (partly boring, but also rewarding) game that most of us played as kids: fill in the blank. How to help? Current status. So that's where we need YOU.
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When is it time to start play-testing with others?
Brand Game Development
JUNE 9, 2017
Dev Diary posts are made to teach game development through specific examples from my latest project: Highways & Byways. The “Highway” designation is my way of saying “I’m ready to play-test the game.” ” Need help on your board game? Just here for Highways & Byways updates?
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GenoTerra - The finished prototype.
Mnenad
JULY 8, 2018
But I can now proudly announce that a playable prototype for the video game GenoTerra is finished (and I graduated with the Master in Design *yay*). Master in Integrative Design. As you might know, and I repeatedly keep saying, this game forms the practical part of my Master thesis. degree of design coherence.
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Godot Showcase - Hive Time developer Cheeseness talks about his experience
Mircosoft Game Dev
FEBRUARY 18, 2021
My name is Cheese, and I'm an Australian independent game developer/Linux porter/freelance generalist based in the small island of Tasmania. I've been making games in some form or another for over thirty years now. I've been making games in some form or another for over thirty years now. How did you discover Godot?
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Schedule for GodotCon 2018 in Pozna?
Mircosoft Game Dev
OCTOBER 7, 2018
The organizers of the Game Industry Conference (which is also in Poznań just after GodotCon) are letting us use their great venue, and it will be a great opportunity to get together with Godot users and core developers (our lead dev Juan Linietsky is coming from Argentina). Workshop: 2D game workshop/demo | Leszek Nowak ( John Meadow ).
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GDNative is here!
Mircosoft Game Dev
APRIL 4, 2017
I'll explain what GDNative exactly is, what it is not , what you can use it for and lastly show you how to use it. I'll explain what GDNative exactly is, what it is not , what you can use it for and lastly show you how to use it. at least the first usable version, there's still work to do, but it's usable! So what is GDNative?
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Godot project management 101
Mircosoft Game Dev
MARCH 27, 2018
For those interested, I'll start by a quick history of how I came to Godot and my involvement so far, which can give you a "real life" illustration of what community-led project management means. I read some of the documentation and tried demos, but only started learning and using the engine for real mid 2015 with version 1.1.
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More programming languages in Godot, want to help?
Mircosoft Game Dev
AUGUST 9, 2016
We understood that most of the code written for a game is not performance critical, and that the C++ part of the engine already covers most of the critical parts, so we originally went for Lua, and then for Squirrel (while trying Python in the process). Why more languages, isn't GDScript enough? This could not be further away from the truth.
Maintenance release: Godot 3.2.2
Mircosoft Game Dev
JUNE 26, 2020
stable branch in January 2020 as a major update to our free and open source game engine. released today, which includes a number of big new features that have been merged and tested over the past few months, on top of the usual batch of bug fixes, usability enhancements, documentation and translation updates. But Godot 4.0
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GSoC 2019 progress report #1 (part 1)
Mircosoft Game Dev
JULY 17, 2019
Since Godot is gradually entering the competitive market, dominated by only a handful of fully featured engines, it is only intuitive that it should support Godot game developers with a strong version control integration from within the editor. How does it look like? Interactive Music by Daniel Matarov.
Godot 3.3 has arrived, with a focus on optimization and reliability
Mircosoft Game Dev
APRIL 21, 2021
x branch to develop and publish their games today , so it's important for us to keep giving Godot 3 users an improved gamedev experience. x branch to develop and publish their games today , so it's important for us to keep giving Godot 3 users an improved gamedev experience. This release was initially planned as a 3.2.4
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How to Identify & Fix Problems with Your Board Game
Brand Game Development
JANUARY 25, 2021
It’s no secret that if you want to make a great board game, you’re going to have to test it a bunch. Games are complex systems. That’s why it’s important to learn how to identify and fix problems with your board game. I’ve written before about the usefulness of documenting your playtesting.
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Solo dev Almar works on debut game Repunk “I’ve had some darker moments”
PreMortem.Games
NOVEMBER 17, 2023
For some, the idea of developing a game alone is daunting. Sadly, the reality of the business showed me that the type of games that pay the rent weren’t the type of experiences I wanted to create”, he says. After a five-year hiatus from game development, he returned as a solo developer to create his debut game Repunk.
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