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to the 111x Home Page This is the first project in a series of related projects that you will be doing over the course of this term. The ultimate 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, programming and testing. As an outcome, you and a small team of peers will be creating a working video game prototype. This project focuses on documentation and the decisions that must be made early in the game development process.
All games begin with an inspired idea, 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 that 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.
For this project, you should form a group of 3 people. Each group will be responsible for writing a Game Treatment document of at least 2000 words. The treatment should be for a game of your own design in the genre of your choice. Each group will turn in a draft of their treatment. The purposes of working on the first draft are to think about design decisions, to develop your ideas to a good level of detail, and to express those ideas clearly in writing.
After the first drafts have been submitted, each group will be assigned at-random to review and critique another group's treatment. During this review, you are to provide thoughtful feedback and analysis of the other group's design document, turning in your comments both to that group and to the instructor. The purpose of the peer review is to give you practice reading, understanding and analysing design documents, as well as to provide each group with feedback for improving their treatments.
Finally, your group is to consider the feedback given to you, incorporating it or not, and formulate a final treatment document. Along with your final treatment, you will submit a short discussion of the feedback that you received, what issues your reviewers raised, what they recommended, and why you did or did not incorporate each of their suggestions. The purpose of the final treatment and review discussion is to give you practice taking and weighing criticism, as well as putting polish on your design document.
The first step in completing this assignment is the formation of groups. You are to form groups of 3 students on your own (groups of 2 or 4 are also possible, but not ideal). Please utilize the class mailing list, as necessary, to get in touch with other students who are looking for a group. If you do not have a group by several days after receiving this assignment, please contact the instructor and TA and we will seek to match you up with a group.
The first draft of your treatment will be due before class on Thursday. The format for your treatment will be an abbreviated format loosly based on the one in On Game Design (Rollings and Adams, 2003). A notable exclusion is any sort of buisness 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 buisness side. The draft should be about 2000 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 describing 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 ID 111x, everyone follows the same production cycle on the same timeline, so this section really only needs to describe 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 description. |
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 a example draft-treatment (word, pdf) to get an idea of what a first draft could look like.
By Friday, your group will receive another group's document for review. Before class on the next Tuesday, you are to turn in your peer-review both to that group, as well as to the instructor. Your peer-review should be 800-1600 words long and include feedback on the style and content of the other group's document. Remark on both positive and negative aspects of their work: what ideas were good, which ones might not work, what parts of the document were clearly written, what questions were left unanswered, where could they make improvements, etc. Download this example critique (word, pdf) to get an idea of what this peer-review could look like.
After receiving feedback on your treatment document, you are to make final revisions to your document and turn it in before class on Thursday. In addition to your final treatment, your group should turn in a 400-800 word discussion of the feedback that you received, what your thoughts on that feedback were, how you incorporated it into your project or why you did not. Download this example final treatment (word, pdf) and this example feedback discussion to get and idea of what these could look like.
All documents are to be submitted electronically via turnin by midnight on the day the assignment is due. Each document should list the names of every member in your group somewhere on the first page.
One member of your group will need to upload the files you are turning in to their CCC account on one of the CCC machines (ccc1 to ccc10). While logged into a CCC machine, that member will need to enter the directory where these files are stored and execute the following:
/cs/bin/turnin submit <course> <assignment> <file1> <file2> ...
where in our case, <course> is id111x, <assignment> is project1, and <file> is the name of your draft treatment. So for example, you might enter:
/cs/bin/turnin submit id111x project1 MyDraftTreatment.doc
Following this, you should verify that your files have been entered into turnin by executing the following command:
/cs/bin/turnin verify id111x project1
You will use turnin for the review and the final treatment, also.
Substitute project1-review, and
project1-final in the turnin commands above, as
appropriate.
| Grading Guidelines | ||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Document | Weight | 100-90 | 89-80 | 79-70 | 69-60 | 59- |
| First-Draft Treatment | 60% summary: 5% overview: 15% production: 5% world: 15% |
The first-draft 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 first-draft 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 first-draft 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 first-draft 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 first-draft 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. |
| Peer Review | 20% summary: 5% overview: 15% production: 5% world: 15% |
The peer review more than satisfies the length and content requirements. There is extensive discussion of the style and content of the other group's document. The feedback given is highly constructive and suggests many ways the peer group could improve their document. | The peer review satisfies the length and content requirements. Detailed remarks and feedback have been given regarding the style and content of the other group's document. The feedback given is constructive and suggests ways the peer group will be able to improve their document. | The peer review minimally satisfies the length and content requirements. Remarks have been made regarding the style and content of the other group's document. The feedback given is somewhat constructive and the peer group will be able to find ways of improving their document. | The peer review does not satisfy some of the length and content requirements. Incomplete or poorly thought-out remarks have been made regarding the style and content of the other group's document. The feedback given is not very constructive and does not indicate ways the peer group could improve their document. | The peer review does not satisfy the length and content requirements. Few meaningful remarks have been made regarding the style and content of the other group's document. Little or no meaningful feedback is given, and there is no indication of how the peer group could improve their document. |
| Final Treatment | 20% treatment: 10% discussion: 10% |
The final treatment more than satisfies the length and content requirements of the project. All descriptions are present and highly detailed, and additional sections or materials have been included. The document is well organized and highly readable. Peer feedback has been taken into consideration, discussed in detail, and appropriate changes have been made. | The final 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 and descriptions are clear. Peer feedback has been taken into consideration, discussed, and appropriate changes have been made. | The final treatment minimally satisfies the requirements of the project. Descriptions of premise, audience, genre, features, platform, story, and gameplay are present but sparse. The document is somewhat organized but still unclear or difficult to read in spots. Peer feedback has been read, discussed breifly, and some appropriate changes have been made. | The final treatment falls short of the length and content requirements in a few places. Some of the required areas are missing, or do not include meaningful information. The document is poorly organized and difficult to read. Peer feedback has been skimmed, breifly mentioned, and few appropriate changes have been made. | The final treatment does not satisfy the length and content requirements. Many of the required descriptions are missing or incomplete. The document is disorganized or difficult to read. Peer feedback has been ignored or only superficially mentioned and few or no changes have been made. |
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.
You might check out the slides (powerpoint, pdf) for this project.
| Deliverable | Description | Example | Time Budget | Due Date |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| First-Draft Treatment | 2000-4000 word treatment for a game of your own design | Dungeon Trawler Draft-Treatment | 10 hours / group member | Thursday, Jan 20th |
| Peer Review | 800-1600 word review and critique of a peer group's treatment | Dungeon Trawler Critique | 5 hours / group member | Tuesday, Jan 25th |
| Final Treatment | 2000-4000 word revised treatment, 400-800 word discussion of feedback | Dungeon Trawler Treatment | 5 hours / group member | Thursday, Jan 27th |
Send all project questions to the TA mailing list (id111x-ta at cs.wpi.edu).