The purpose of a GDD
Documentation serves two purposes:
- Providing the team with a detailed description of what needs to be done (communication)
- Acting like a sort of encyclopedia of the game, where the team can keep track of what has been done, how and why it has been done, and what has changed (memory)
This means that the job of the game designer is not only to design the game on paper before any software is written, but also to ensure that everything that is documented is and remains up to date. Whenever something changes down the line or is not implemented exactly as per the documentation, it is important that the documentation is updated.
A great practice is to add comments about why (and how) the final implementation is different from the initial design. This scenario happens all the time in game development.
In fact, no game designer has ever handed their document to the rest of the team without being asked to modify or remove something that could be...
