Now that in the first few pages of the design document we've created a wonderful introduction to the game, we can move on to the rest of the document. Here, a lot of templates vary and offer different opinions on how things should be presented. I believe it's probably best to insert a few paragraphs on how you see the artistic style of your game as a whole. This should describe the look and feel of your game. Is it cartoony like Angry Birds? Or is it trying to be a photo-real thing? Is it based on cute little icons and game pieces that you've sculpted out of clay? You should back up your writing with just a few examples of your illustrations, or art references to show what you're going for in terms of style. Here, obviously, it helps to have your own artwork created within that set style. Now, style, think about it, covers not only the environment and characters, but also the look and feel of your interface, your game menus and sound, too. It is cartoony? Is it real? Don't show off all of your artwork here. It's just to show the overall style of your game. Next for your design document, since you have laid out a story synopsis already, you would do very well to present your characters now. Here you're gonna use the character brief and lists that you created for your main characters, along with any of the design artwork that you've created for them in the game. These can be presented nicely, next to each other, so that each character brief is accompanied by artwork showing that character off. Obviously, you start with your hero, your protagonist, and then move on to your villain, the antagonist, and then move on to a handful of the major characters that play a big role in your game. After this should come the settings, and their descriptions, your environment, and the artwork that comes along with that. Same as with the characters. Here you want to start with the primary, or most important location, and then move onto the others, showing that artwork that you've created. If items like vehicles and weapons and so on are important in the game, you should really consider also including some descriptions of those here as well. For example, does your hero drive a special car in your game, and if so, what is it? What is the history of this special car and what's it look like? Use much the same considerations for the character and settings descriptions as we've laid out before. But don't go overboard describing everything in your game. You're not presenting a full asset list, just the creative design choices that you've made for the more important aspects of your game to define the style. Now, after you've established the creative aspects of your game, and given your reader a valuable insight into your idea, the rest of the design document, can lay out the more mechanical and pragmatic choices for the game. For instance, describing the interface, and the controls the player will have over your game. Is it all keyboard, or do you need a game controller? Is it a touch interface? Again, those design document templates I've suggested earlier do a really good job of herding this kind of information into a sensible format, and also, actually help you flush out the mechanics of your game. Here's where you will wanna let us know things like how the game loads and on what platforms you wanna play it on, Playstation, phone, whatever. Describe your interface clearly and how we interact with it as people. Basically, you wanna define how the player uses the game at all physical levels. Can you create maps and modify the game? Can you design your own characters and even levels to plug into the game? Are there any online components? How does multiplayer work, if it does at all? Can you perhaps play the levels out of story mode? Is there like a free range mode? Things like this fill out the design document, as you can tell from a lot of those templates that are posted on the Internet. Now, I'm not gonna get into creating that stuff for the design document. We're just here for the creative parts in this course.
