Mickey Machine Gun - Design Documentation
As part of my course at university I was tasked with creating a Concept and Micro Design Document brief as a game pitch. As part of this unit, I was tasked with researching the underpinning skills and goals of a product pitch as well as the fundamentals of crafting a useful game design and concept document for use as part of a team.
The project helped me further my own product design skills as well as paying attention to more than just “cool ideas” and really try to apply thought and weight behind my decisions with regards to context and gameplay progression.
Concept Document
The core part of any game pitch and brief is its concept. Mechanics are the foundations of a game and what helps underpin it are its conceptual details that can help tie it together or juice up the mechanics enough to truly make them shine. So, for this concept document I really wanted to show off the foundational mechanics of a pinball/katamari style action puzzler and try to give it an interesting but fairly simply thematic cohesion. Being a fan of styles such as those of Binding of Isaac, Super Meat Boy and Silent Hill I wanted to try and give it a humorous but dark spin. So, I tried to hone into making the movement system a key part of the character’s design and appeal and shape a narrative around this.
The concept document being the big entry into the game pitch covers a range of aspects from narrative and characters to the game’s weapons, levels, and movement and how they correlate with each other. Along with providing a very grounded realisation of what this game’s world could be and how its mechanics relate in regard to that world. The importance of my focus was attempting to pitch and design something that was cohesive in both design and visuals, so to help with this throughout designing I followed the clockwork methodology for designing the games movement and mechanics to help me with this.
The following embed is the Concept Design Document I made for the proposed project as well as a button for pdf download.
Micro Design Document
Having given an overview and concept of the game I then proceeded to craft a Micro Design Document to dig into the gameplay mechanics, user interface and level design goals as well as the player’s interaction with the game. The Micro Design Document helps to further illustrate and give a deeper sense of the game’s User interaction and progression.
The following embed is the Micro Game Design Document I made for the proposed project as well as a button for pdf download.