Has anyone ever made a GDD for their RM games?

[Alexander Amnell]

I never used a gdd or anything fancy and structured like that, (to be honest, all my past games I did pretty disorganized... probably why they failed) Though for my current project I have a three ring binder with more than 90 pages of information on my game that is growing daily (I brainstorm during my lunch break then come home and actually work on the project.) I also have a 126 page microsoft word document that covers the story in my game from start to finish. I figure the structure really isn't needed when your design group consists of one person but having the information before working on the project is clearly necessary for me now.

 

[Allerka]

When I started my RM project, no (though I'd done work on one for another idea or two I had). Now though, absolutely. If there's one thing I've learned at my age, it's that I'm not going to remember everything (although it's a lesson bad habits have kept me from fully realizing). So, if nothing else, the GDD for my game is a record of all my different thoughts and ideas, a place for me to take them out of the roaring, gleeful chaos of my mind and put them into a more coherent space. And good gravy is it long. I have one section that outlines all the planned maps for my game, with only 2-4 sentences describing each map, and that section is something like eleven pages long. Ditto for the basic rundowns of the story-essential NPCs. The script for my game is 120 pages.

I don't feel like GDDs are restricting at all. Remember, they're a living document. They WILL change over the course of development. Even if it's just a place for you to get your thoughts together and outline what you want to do, just that much can help. Now that I have a defined list of the maps my game needs, I can get them produced faster with that sense of direction rather than sit there and be all "How big do I want this town to be? Should that inn have two floors or three?" when it comes time to actually make stuff. And if I want to add on to what I have later, I CAN. Nothing's stopping me from doing more later on if I want.

Although that articy program has me very intrigued. It was even used for something as big as Star Citizen... Definitely looks like something to look into, and would be much better for organizing my thoughts than Word, heh.

 

[Eschaton]

I think it's important to give you an itemized list of steps that you can refer to and check off. It will also help prevent feature creep.

 

[Omnimental]

I don't enjoy crafting a GDD for my games, but I've found that doing so immensely helps me stay concentrated on the project.  I'll usually have ten or so different projects running at once (couple of art pieces, couple of RM games, couple of tabletop games...) so having something to keep me on task helps substantially.

 

[Pugh95Bear]

Actually, I know what my issue with these "design documents" is.  It's that I much prefer to be getting my hands dirty and getting messy instead of spending that same amount of time planning how I'll get my hands dirty and how I'll best avoid get messy.  I like to tell myself that I can clean up later 'cause getting dirty is fun right now.  I'll let others stick to the "Try not to get all messy so as to avoid cleaning up later" method.

I am kinda like this in my computer programming class. We are often required to create flowcharts to submit with the programs, and we are *supposed* to do the flowcharts before we write the program. The problem, however, is that I never really make progress this way. So, instead, I write the program and debug first, THEN I do the flowcharts to submit. Yeah... I'm not supposed to do that xp. Oh well.


I do have a sort of journal I keep, though right now I just refer to it as the "General Game Journal." I use it as a log for what resources I download and who to credit. As I have no *real* projects started, only ideas of what to do in them, I haven't made any dedicated journals, though I probably will.