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