You must use Game Maker for your game.

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.

The first step in completing this assignment is the formation of groups. You are to form groups of 3 students on your own. Please utilize the class mailing list, as necessary, to get in touch with other students who are looking for a group.

Email a list of your team members and a team name to imgd1001-ta at cs.wpi.edu by Wednesday 11:59pm.

If you do not have a group by Wednesday mid-day, please contact the instructor and TAs and we will help match you up with a group.

The format for your treatment will be an abbreviated format loosely based on the one in On Game Design (Rollings and Adams, 2003) (don't worry if you do not have this book, but you might borrow one to skim sometime). A notable exclusion is any sort of business documentation such as executive summary, market analysis and competition analysis. The intent is to keep the focus of this project focused on the development side, rather than the business side. The draft should be about 2,000 words long (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's at the core of the project.
Game Summary	The Game Summary should contain an attention-grabbing paragraph describing your game, along with a list of novel features that your game will have.
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.
Production Details	The Production Details should describe your team, how you will accomplish the development of this game, and what the timeline for this undertaking will look like. For the purposes of IMGD 1001, everyone follows the same production cycle on the same timeline, so the main novel part is the description of your team.
Game World	The Game World section should describe the setting and characters of your game. For a narrative style game, this means some backstory for the world, descriptions of the characters and their roles they will play, and descriptions of any other important artifacts in the game world. For a non-narrative game, such as a puzzle game, you will still have some playing field, and objects, interacting on that playing field in many different ways - the field, these objects and their interactions will need descriptions.

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.

Finally, you must write a short README (as a separate text file, or in the last section) that describes where you put additional emphasis in your treatment. The extra emphasis can be additional art elements, details on game balance, more backstory or puzzle/challenge details, or whatever is appropriate for your game idea. The README should both say where the extra emphasis was placed and why. This README will be used by the TAs to weigh the grading (see Grading below) for your document. Note, this section itself will be worth some points.

Make sure to include the README file as well (or include it at the end of your main document).

When you are ready to submit, zip everything up into a single archive file. Name the file TeamName_proj2.zip.

You will use the new Web-based "Turnin" facility to submit your work. Information about submitting can be found here:

http://web.cs.wpi.edu/~kfisler/turnin.html.

Choose one of your team members to submit the document.

Use your WPI user ID should be used to login, and you should have been emailed a password.
The Turnin assignment ID is proj2.

Grading Guidelines
Document	Weight	100-90	89-80	79-70	69-60	59-
Treatment	100% Summary: 10% Overview: 30% Production: 10% World: 30% README: 5% Custom: 15%	The treatment more than satisfies the length and content requirements of the project. All descriptions are present and detailed. The document is well organized and readable.	The treatment satisfies the length and content requirements of the project. Descriptions of premise, audience, genre, features, platform, story and gameplay are present and complete. The document is well organized.	The treatment minimally satisfies the requirements of the project. Descriptions of premise, audience, genre, features, platform, story, and gameplay are mostly present. The document is somewhat organized, but difficult to read at times.	The treatment falls short of the length and content requirements in a few places. Many of the required areas are missing, or do not include meaningful information. The document is poorly organized and difficult to read.	The treatment does not satisfy the length and content requirements. Most of the required descriptions are missing or incomplete. The document is disorganized and difficult to read.

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.