Awesome animations!

Agree on all points. As someone who’s done AAA and now trying to get my indie wings, I think it’s in everyone’s best interests to raise prices a bit. It’s just bad timing given all the economic tumult, but it’s inevitable.

Hopefully it means less mass layoffs, at the least.

Not in my experience. I use the docs like my dev Bible, and rarely need to look elsewhere.

See for yourself: docs.godotengine.org/en/stable/

I think the pricing is fine. It’s about time game prices went up. Also, as the cost of AAA rises, so can the cost of AA and indies rise relative to the average. It’s been a long time coming, and I think the only downside is it’s being done right before an economic downturn.

I’m a big fan of the Godot engine, which can use native GDScript, a Python-like script, or C#. Godot runs on things that Unity and Unreal can’t.

Of course you can decide not to use an engine, but rather a library, which allows you to use many different general purpose languages, but it’ll be harder

Music. I love music theory, expression, and creativity.

But it should be a consideration. I intend on making games that appeal to narrow demos, because they’re games I like, but it does hurt a games potential reach.

These things you mentioned all provide a lot of friction to gameplay. If you’re designing a game for “everyone” then you don’t include them or you will force some subset of players to bounce off it.

Not a bad thing, but target demo matters. I’m not pro-homogenization, I prefer a range of things.

SepterraCore, a little FF clone with a big heart made in 2000 by a now defunct Valkyrie Studios. I love it, bugs and all.

Yeah, start with the high-level and fill in details as they resolve. Obsidian is a great tool for something like that.

Keep in mind this is just based on my personal experience in the AAA space, which was brief, but the way it was done there the “GDD” was a small part of a large Confluence KB that also included thousands of supporting pages. Tech specs, tables, mood boards, pitches, feature pages, explorations, etc.

Well, the purpose of a GDD is to provide an overall guide for multiple people or teams to use. It’s to get everyone on the same page, but in abstract. Designers don’t need to know engineering specs, and artists don’t care about narrative details. Those details should be somewhere else.

Characters, environments, enemies, narrative, art style, audio anything your game will include. Try not to get into the technical weeds with implementation details, leave that for tech docs. If it’s for internal eyes only, it’s ok to leave gaps or messy spots. If it’s client facing make it look good

Ahh, got it. I wouldn’t worry too much about a “standard” as there probably isn’t one. Make sure it describes the important aspects of your game. Try to explain the game from the player’s POV, aka what you want them to experience. Include high-level descriptions of things like scope, mechanics, -

I’m Richard, based in Seattle, Wa. I’ve worked 2.5 years in the AAA space before getting caught in mass layoffs. Before that IT was my main job and I dabbled in game dev. Currently looking for work, but also working on a village sim type game with a buddy. I’d love to gain some mutuals!

I want to show the shy, anxious, imposter-syndrome people who are silently screaming to be heard that they CAN find a voice of their own. I intend on mostly posting about gamedev or other stuff I find fascinating, but once in a while I’ll need to post stuff like this.

The thought of opening up to strangers scares me, but I really want to find my dev community here and so I need to tell my truth, as ugly as it has been.

I want to connect with other creatives who are passionate about their work. I want to be inspired and inspire others.

You need to have a seed of an idea, or you might end up struggling with coming up with something that feels special. Some ppl are great at pure concept, but you might need to play around with ideas before something emerges.

Nobody likes creating GDDs, except those weirdos who always liked taking notes, or over-documenters. If you try to start with the GDD, imo, it’s like starting a novel by staring at a blank page and expecting a story to emerge.