Return to the 1001 Home PageThis is the first 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, 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. Grading for this project will be somewhat flexible based on the emphasis of your treatment (see the Grading section for details).
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 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. 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 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 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 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 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 (word, pdf) and this example feedback discussion 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, 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.
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 imgd1001, <assignment> is project2, and <file> is the name of your draft treatment. So for example, you might enter:
/cs/bin/turnin submit imgd1001 project2 MyTreatment.doc
Following this, you should verify that your files have been entered into turnin by executing the following command:
/cs/bin/turnin verify imgd1001 project2
| 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.
Send all project questions to the TA mailing list (imgd1001-ta at cs.wpi.edu)
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