Due date: Wednesday, May 24th in class
This 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 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. 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 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 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 treatment 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 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 treatment (word, pdf) to get and idea of what these could look like.
All documents are to be submitted in hard copy in class and also electronically via email on the day the assignment is due. Each document should list the names of every member in your group (as appropriate) somewhere on the first page.
For the electronic submission:
| Grading Guidelines | ||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Document | Weight | 100-90 | 89-80 | 79-70 | 69-60 | 59- |
| 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. | 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. | 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. | 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. | 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. |
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 |
|---|---|---|---|
| Treatment | 2000-4000 word treatment for a game of your own design | Dungeon Trawler Treatment | 10 hours / group member |
Send all project questions to the TA mailing list (imgd1001-ta at cs.wpi.edu).