Claypool's Lectures at Osaka University, Summer 2010
Project 2: Game Inception and Design

Due date: Friday, July 10th, by 11:59pm

Objective: This is the second project in a series of related projects that you will be doing over the course of this term. The end-goal of these projects is to expose you to the overall process of game development by introducing you to the facets of design, content creation and programming and testing. As an outcome, you and a classmate will create a working video game prototype. This project focuses on documentation and the decisions that must be made early in the game development process. x

Important! You must use Game Maker for your game, so keep that in mind for this assignment.


Motivation: All games begin with an inspired idea. The idea may come as a sequel to a previous game, a license to make a game from a film, or even an original game concept. But an idea alone is not a design for a game. The idea must be elaborated upon to the point where the various team members can begin their work. No matter what role you play as a developer, your tasks will be shaped by the design. Programmers will need to make good on the promised features. Artists will need to bring the various characters and places to life. Designers will need to put the world together in a way that is entertaining. Testers will need to verify and test the resulting experience, and communicate shortcomings back to the rest of the team.

Since design documentation is integral to every role in the game development process, it will benefit you greatly to better understand design documents. The purpose of this assignment is to familiarize you with reading and understanding design documents, to stimulate your thinking about how the various aspects of a design relate to each other, to exercise your ability to expand a small idea into a full design, and to improve upon your skills at writing documentation that is meant to be read (and understood) by other people.


Details: For this project, you should form a group of 2 people. Each group will be responsible for writing a Game Treatment document of about 600 words (a 10-point font, single column, single page document). The treatment should be for a game of your own design in the genre of your choice. The purposes are to think about design decisions, to develop your ideas to a good level of detail, and to express those ideas clearly in writing.

The first step in completing this assignment is the formation of a group. You are to form a group of 2 students on your own.

Your treatment is intended to keep the focus of this project focused on the development side (rather than the business side). The draft should be about 600 words long (and can be bit longer, if needed), and must contain the following elements:
Title and Description Your game should have an appropriate Title and a one-sentence Description of your game. Specifically distilling a game concept down to a single sentence can help pin down what is at the core of the project.
Game Overview The Game Overview should contain the details relevant to the high-concept of the game, such as: the concept, the genre, player motivation, a list of novel features, the target platform, high-level design goals, notes on how the game will play, etc. This section should include important objects (e.g. characters and items) in your game and their interactions. Include game rules (e.g. how scoring will work and win conditions).

Along with the above sections, feel free to supplement your treatment with any of the following optional elements: mocked-up screenshots, concept sketches, sample level designs, backstory, character descriptions, game balance discussions, and etc. You can download this example final treatment to get and idea of what these could look like. Note! That sample document is much longer than yours should be and is only provided to give you an idea of a fully-fleshed out treatment document.


Submission: All documents are to be submitted electronically via turnin by 23:59 on the day the assignment is due.

Each document should list the names of the group members on the first page. Important! Include an email address for each person, too.

Choose one of your team members to submit the document.

Email your document to me (claypool at cs.wpi.edu) as an attachment. Use "Project 2" as the subject.


Resources:

For a presentation summary, you might check out the slides (ppt, pdf) for this project.

The Doom Bible (pdf)- Design document for Id Software's classic First-Person Shooter. It is interesting to note the differences between this document and the final game.

Capture The Dude - an example of a design doc written by former DigiPen student Doug Quinn.

The book On Game Design, by Andrew Rollings and Ernest Adams (New Riders, 2003. ISBN: 1-5927-3001-9) has an example game treatment document.


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