Designing a Design Document…

Whew. I just finished writing my first game design document, for Pacifist. It’s about twelve pages long and I wrote it all today, after I got back from a BBQ at a friends. Effort.

I’ve done all that writing for a reason though – I’ve somehow managed to drum up a bit of interest for the idea of Pacifist and have abused my position as a games journalist to get a coder or two on board from within the Bit-tech community.

In my job, I often get people saying things along the lines of “Yeah, but it must get pretty dull after a while, right? You play games all day, but it must take the fun out of the games you actually want to play, right?”

The answer is always no, it doesn’t. I get paid to play games, then write about them. That shit never gets dull when you only have three hobbies in life; drinking and the two previously mentioned activities. It occasionally creates a bit of hassle, yeah, but as long as I have a USB stick I can bring my savegames home from the office and keep gaming here. Ace!

Game design on the other hand is a different story and, though writing the design document hasn’t made this prospect any less exciting assuming it gets off the ground, writing that much about it has muted by vigor somewhat. I’m still eager to go and full of shit and salt (and piss and vinegar), but after writing paragraph after paragraph about how the Main Menu links to the Help page, I’m a little tired. Wasted actually.

On the other hand, it really does help bring your vision into focus. I had the idea for Pacifist when I was walking to work one day and I thought it would be cool to have a game built around pacifism because, hey, you could make a cool arty game out of it with a subtext about Tibet, right? It was loose and flabby.

By writing this Design Document though I’ve been able tone that flabby idea right up, changing a concept around several times to something I think could actually work.

And that brings all the excitement flooding back.

Out, LG.