Regarding Game Design Documents and collaboration

[gekiganwing]

I stumbled across this idea while browsing Equestria Gaming this morning. Somehow, I had not heard of it until today. So I'm writing about it to see if anyone thinks it's practical and beneficial.

According to what I read, Game Design Documents are used "...to coordinate efforts amongst a development team. It forms a sort of guide to all the team-members, so everyone has a sight of the overall vision. A GDD simply contains information on aspects of the game, such as story, characters, level design, gameplay, art, music, user interface, and controls. There's no specific formula to create a GDD, it just has whatever information and content the developer chooses to include."

The article goes on to say that the site welcomes Game Design Documents from people seeking assistance, and that it also welcomes virtual resumes from people who have time and talents to share. It seems similar to classified ads.

Is this idea better than current methods of recruiting and offering support? Would people use it?

[Deji]

Being able to look at a short-ish GDD before deciding on joining a game dev team would be *awesome*.

Also the simple* act of creating a GDD helps the game creator to define the actual flow of the game, the features and the scope, avoiding feature creep like whoa (as long as they abide to the original GDD instead of constantly change it... yeah, you can do that too, though is not advisable unless you have a good reason to do it).
The only problem I can see with sharing GDDs are possible spoilers ): So you could have an... uhm... abridged/spoiler-free GDD for recruiting?


If people here are interested, we could put together a GDD template for people to use either for recruitment purposes or for their own (:

* not so simple.

[CosmicKitty]

I think GDD's are essential, especially when working with a team. This one is much more in depth than most projects here need, but is a really good example and you can omit parts you don't want.

https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B_9cMVn ... edit?hl=en

[dramspringfeald]

See now that just makes sense. If everyone in the party knows what's going on then the project moves much smoother and faster.

*Edit

Also found Game Design Methods a "One stop shop" if you will for Quick and dirty tutorials to help you understand the industry and get you started on your project.