How to write a Game Design Document
Proper design documentation can be one of the most important elements of video game production. Without them, team members may struggle to stay on the same page when designing features, and development can run horribly awry. Many studios use Game Design Documents (GDDs) to communicate their vision for a game to other team members or stakeholders. Though the days of any sort of monolithic GDD format or design bible are long gone, they still have a place in many designers' and teams' methodologies.
Want to know what a good GDD should look like? We consulted with a number of talented game designers to gather the best practices for writing and maintaining a modern documentation. If you make sure your GDD is easily searchable, readable, and concise, it will be an incredibly valuable resource for you and your team.
Game Design Documents can be thought of as the "blueprints" for putting together a game. First and foremost, they should very clearly communicate the designer's vision for a game, and do so in a way that is useful and readable for every team member or stakeholder, no matter their discipline.
Put in another way, it's a piece of documentation that needs to make sense to many different people who work on different aspects of game development: your GDD needs to be crystal clear to artists, animators, engineers, systems designers, level designers, sound designers, musical composers, marketers, producers, really, anyone who is a part of making this game happen.
If you are a solo developer, you may still find a GDD helpful as a reference for yourself (perhaps when you are mired in the "swamp" of the development process to go back and have an answer for "what was I thinking?").
The following list notes several common reasons
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