The Short Game Planning Document

When you are asked to plan your game, many people normally think of writing a design document straight away. Don’t. This article is here to help you work your way into planning your game slowly from scratch. When presented with a blank document or even a design document template and asked to plan a game, many people don’t even know where to start. A good number of people only have a few vague ideas and never know how to expand on their ‘big idea’ and make it so they can visualize it in their heads. Once you have a good structure of ideas, and a solid picture of the game’s genre, scenery and other important information, you can start your design document. However what you’ll learn about here is creating your ‘Short Game Planning Document’. This starts you off with your first, basic idea which hasn’t been thought out and helps you expand on it to give you more ideas and a better introduction to the sections required to be planned in the game design document.

Starting off
Like all great games, they need to start somewhere, and that starting place is a simple prompt or idea. This stage is called generating ideas which is used to gather more ideas from that simple prompt or idea. For example, consider this prompt which I have come up with my latest Space Invaders clone:

“Space-craft lost in space, attacked by mutants and unknown species.”

From this alone, you couldn’t jump straight in and write your design document. You simply don’t have enough information to fill out the game description or any other required information. This is where the generating ideas stage comes in. By studying the prompt/idea, you attempt to expand on it and create new ideas which can be expanded again, to give you a bigger selection of possible ideas. You look at each word which has significant meaning and think about objects, colours, surroundings, actions etc which could match the corresponding word. For example take a look at my generating ideas stage for the prompt given above:



Now I have a spider diagram of lots more ideas which I could put forward to planning and designing my game.

Creating the document
Take a piece of paper, word document or even a blank MS Paint canvas and create a title of Short Game Planning Document. Then type your prompt or initial idea just under the title. If you don’t have something like I had to use, just put your little ideas into a sentence that makes sense which you could expand on. Then like the example I gave you above, start on your diagram. You have no limit of how much you write about each significant word in your prompt. It is an advantage to write more as you’ll find yourself coming up with ideas for character appearances and actions and other relevant ideas.

Finalizing your document
Now you have lots of ideas written down, it is good to summarize them all in a short summary. This helps when it comes to writing the game description in your design document and gives you a head start on thinking what actually could happen in the game. If you used MS Paint for your previous work, save it and then open a notepad document for your summary, making sure you save both pieces of work in a folder for your design work on the computer. Otherwise if you used one of the other two methods just create this in a new paragraph under your previous work.

Take all the ideas you have gathered and write a short summary paragraph giving an idea of what the potential player would experience and encounter when playing your game. Also include short descriptions of any characters you’ve identified which have been expanded from just the key words you have used in your diagram. For an example of this, consider my space invaders clone I used in the first section, here is a sample paragraph I would write for my diagram I created:


 * Lost in space, the small space fighter jet drifted through space, one of the engines damaged from a previous encounter of a herd of unknown species with strange properties. The mission is to find out where the jet is located and to fix engine 4 and the navigation system. Also after maintenance, another mission is to navigate the jet back to Earth. Also using a limited amount of ammo on-board, you have to prepare yourself for any other incoming attack from the unknown. You have to be careful around the planets circling the jet, as they are not like the ones in the Milky Way, but are filled with dread and mystery. There seems like no other human life forms anywhere near, and the mutants that swarm the planets, do not welcome humans, let alone peace. They are paired and travel that way, almost like a conga of couples. The speak in languages the human tongue cannot pronounce and speak from the very green and decaying chests that emit the horrid sound of only what could be described as their conversation. Only way is to find a place to restock ammo and find pieces to help fix the navigation and engine. However the planets do not look inviting and the owners are far from the kind of life forms willing to let you pass without a fight.

Using the ideas gathered in the diagram, I have expanded on them and made them into a summary paragraph almost introducing the setting and current situation to the player. However this is only meant to be a summary so not much detail about actual specific characters or properties is introduced. This is meant to be an exercise to help bring you slowly into what you must write in your design document as you must describe what happens during the game from the player’s eyes without actually telling them what you would click or press etc.

Conclusion
I hope this article has been of some use and helped you work your way into planning easier. Now your next stage is to start on a design document which will require such writing as what you practiced in the previous section. Don’t be afraid to keep coming back and adding to your diagram or summary paragraph as it all helps in the long run, and you can easily add more detail to your proper design document. Happy game designing.