How is a design document used by a game designer?
The game designer – the lead game designer, who puts the design document together originally – will spend some time on that and solicit feedback from other game designers and coders while the document is being put together. Once the design document is up and running, and it’s a good snapshot of what we want, the rest of the team will scrutinise it and pull out the bits that they think are relevant for their area of work. As game development progresses, the design document is kept up to date, so it’s a live working document in a lot of ways. As we discover that some of the initial ideas don’t work, we’ll adjust it. As you find that there are certain areas that require more detail, again you’ll keep the design document up to date and look after it. It can get quite weighty and very big.
