07 August 2011

Wanna See My GDD?

So, while we are unfortunately shelving Space Miner 2 for a bit (see last blog post if you missed it), a couple of cool things have happened for our favorite space game recently. One is that we were asked to provide assets for Wired for their upcoming App Store issue! Hopefully, that'll mean a sales bumpJ The other is that we were asked for the "Space Miner Dev Story" for inclusion in an upcoming book about the App Store.

I've spent the last couple of hours working on that, and while trying to remember exactly how the whole thing went down, I decided to go through our svn archive and look at how our GDD changed over time. I'm actually surprised how close we were to our original game design in the end, although it seemed like there were some big feature changes at the time. I guess hindsight brings perspective though, and looking back they apparently weren't core features after all.

Anyhow, I was reading it through and thought to myself "Hey, this is kind of interesting." Honestly, it's been long enough now I felt like I was reading it for the first time, and I wrote most of it! Since it seems like a lot of our twitter followers and blog readers are other devs, I thought I'd just post it for the curious to check out. It's not 100% accurate, probably more like 80% (some of it towards the end is just not finished), and it's not everything, since we have a lot of helper spreadsheets and documents, but it definitely has the heart of the game. To guarantee its authenticity I even left in all of the typos J

So I'm throwing it out on the interwebs to see if people are interested and we'll see what kind of comments we get. Happy reading!

--Brandon

Space Miner GDD

PS - Do not consider this gdd a template for what a "game industry gdd" is. There is no such thing. To be honest, our preferred method now is just working with loosely organized wiki pages, and I think that's the best way yet.