Year 2: Monday lecture 06/10/14

The first day we came back to university we had our first lecture taken by one of our tutors George Beard. In this lecture we learnt about our first studio project for BA4 creating a game prototype and going through design processes to improve the final design.

At the start of the lecture talked about the GGD (game design document) and what information is shown within this document.  We then went over the different categories inside against design documents such as narrative, characters, art style, sound effects and game play mechanics.

We then looked at different ways that this can be visually shown to the viewer of against design document. Such as character designs could be shown as a mood board or layout for game levels could be blocked out in 3-D software. This is a good way to explain visually your ideas without having to for the viewer with so much text which would put them off from reading the documents as after all game design documents are often used to picture game idea to a company or investor.

.  Another part of the games design document that we look at was the design of levels and how they are produced. That often in a early concept art they are shown similar to real-world maps both taken from a bird’s eye view and often not showing any detail of buildings only the structure of the player path

To get about a better look at real games design document we looked at the one created for naughty dogs game uncharted two. Though being many hundreds of pages long it was mostly made up of images either of concept art or visual interpretations of important points like environment, level construction and characters.After this we looked into mock-up images these would-be the images created by the Art team of the games company to show certain key aspects of the game that they wish to create to give our rough visual interpretation of what areas characters or game play mechanics may look like in the game.

We then finished up the lecture with talking about the overall content of against design documents and different visual and text based ways that we can show the information to the viewer.

After this we finished up with questions about certain aspects of the game document and then ended the lecture.

Personally I found this lecture to be very enjoyable as I have construct to the game design document in the past but would like to take further steps in refining and polishing games design document it was also interesting to see how real games companies would construct and convey their game design is in a short documents such as a game document I feel that on this first assignment it’s going to be very enjoyable as I have some experience and also I find it very interesting in compressing down an idea to show to someone.