Monday, March 19, 2007

Online Design Documents

Update: I finished Final Fantasy XII at last. I guess my comment referring to a giant dragon boss with a dozen healthbars in the last update occured to me unconsciously from a boss in FFXII called Yiazmat: A bigass dragon that takes several hours of fighting just to whittle down its massive HP count. I guess it's this obsession with finishing everything that can be done with a game that makes me reluctant to try MMORPGs, since I'd be stuck in an endless loop of conquering every little bit of new content that is added. That, and the persistent bugbear of spending the price of a new game for the same one each month.

What this update is actually about, besides just bragging about beating a game, is an idea I have to upload some Design Documents somewhere for people to read if they're interested in the nitty gritty of all these game ideas. As it stands, I barely scratch the tip of the iceburg with these blog entries, even though they are often the length of a small novel. What I may start doing now is drop the word count by about half and just introduce a few concepts with the game idea, and then have a link to where I've uploaded a Word document (or just a .txt file, since I won't be doing too much with the presentation at this point) with the vast amount of detail I have in mind for the game at this stage and then keep updating that document whenever something new strikes me or I want to add a table of potential enemies or power-ups or something.

With this system, any visitors to this blog can just skim through the game idea posts a lot quicker. If the idea sounds intriguing, you can read further by following the link to the .doc . If not, skip it and read the next one. If you're able to read twice as many of these "nutshell" posts during a lunch break or what have you, it would help the chances of finding one that interests you. In time, I hope to translate these documents to browsable websites with different pages for each section (characters, features, playing stages) of the game idea.

There are a few problems with this that I can see so far:
1) I may need to rewrite the 20+ game ideas the blog has had so far for this shorter format. I think the best thing would be either to delete the old ones and have new and improved re-writes, or just leave them and use this new short-post system from this point onwards. I will, of course, make design documents for my older ideas too at some point.
2) It will take a lot longer to produce full game ideas, since I'll be investing more time in them. Thus, when a new game idea is on the blog the design document for it will be pretty short, because it hasn't been around long enough for a lot to have been written about it. I figure between new game idea posts on the blog I'll also do a "what design documents have been updated this week" round-up, mentioning what has been added to which document.
3) There's always the threat of plagiarism by putting largely developed game designs out there instead of short blurbs, but my low self-esteem assures me I have nothing to worry about there.
4) Storing doc/txt files somewhere on the internet. Obviously size isn't important, since the bigger ones will still only be about 300k at the most, but finding somewhere that'll host them for free.