Over the course of this semester, I’ve learned a lot about the pre-production phase of game design. We’ve learned how to create Game Design Documents (GDDs), analyze and assess our project’s risks, and create a plan for our project. Each of these documents have aided in the planning and cementing our project’s design for the next semester.

While completing the Risk Analysis documentation, we as a team learned how to assess risks that our project has. We assessed and brought to light many of the known unknowns in our game, such as some systems that may take more time to fully develop or our game’s message getting misinterpreted, and we were initially surprised by the fact we had so many frequent high-risk issues that we had to tackle. While we initially tried to minimize our high-risk features again, we eventually decided to keep the risks to our project in mind as we move into the production phase.

The Project plan so far has helped with the organization and time management of our project. Within this document, we have set clear goals/objectives/deliverables that we as a team need to reach. It has also helped keep the team organized, both in the sense of our project’s goals and purpose, but also with knowing what tasks each of us have and the roles we play in the project’s development.

While working on the GDD, I can feel this is the heart of the project so far. During production, we can use this as a textbook for our project that we can look back to if we need clarification on a system, interaction, or design choice. It contains at least every surface level detail of our project, and often dives into deeper detail, like with the game’s mechanics or a description of the game’s planned cutscenes. Overall, the GDD has helped keep our project vision concrete

As a general note, I found that working on each of these documents together as a team has strengthened our understanding of our project’s design, as each of us were present to discuss and debate on features and ways to take the project, all of us listening and providing our feedback.