Design Documentation Overview
Note
The exact content may not match up directly with what was built in game. This is strong reference and guidance but not gospel.
Serves as notes, information, and a pseudo GDD. Scale and depth of the project necessitates some broader direction.
| Enemies | - Enemy, boss, minion design decisions and focus.
| Itemization | - Itemization, and gear progression.
| Progression | - Personal player progression.
Pages are broken up into the core pillars of design based on our overall goals.
- Improve player agency
- Player customization, growth, and decision making. Giving each play more choices, for every play through, regardless of their goals.
- A push and pull of "tension"
- Enemies, challenges, and random events add tension. Difficulty needs to be high enough for it to matter, and frequent enough for players to think about. Players progress, grow, and improve, which reduces tension. This gives breathing room and a break from the chaos.
- Critical successes, critical failures
- Everything culminates into larger moments of failure or success. Being rewarded for successes, and punished for failures. This gives players a reason to take the time to engage with our other systems.
| Goals | - Short term goals
Our GDD will cover information on design philosophy, principles, and goals. Design elements, items, broad mechanics, and decision making on tooling can be found in their respective sections.
I've broken things off based on how I've grouped them up in the code, and when I tackle problems in relation to others.