3B. Game Design Document

Due: April 10th, 2024 (by 5pm)

Weight: 25% of final grade

Medium: Any

Stream: Game Design

Length: (~2000 words minimum, no max)

You can collaborate with another student (or students) in class on this game design project to produce something particularly sizeable. Essentially the rule of thumb is, if two people work together their project should be twice as large as a single person.

Your goal is to develop a detailed game design document (hereafter GDD, based on the template by Rosa Carbo-Mascarell, ported to Obsidian by Shawn Graham and available on our shared Obsidian vault). This document will ask you to think through and develop detailed descriptions of game mechanics and game play for a possible game of your own design.

Your goal is not simply to create a game set in the past, but to create a history game, i.e. a game that communicates a clear thesis about the past through its mechanics. Essentially, if you complete this assignment I want you to be able to walk away from this class with something in hand that you can use to showcase your game design skills (to use in the classroom etc.)

Your project needs to include:

1. Catchy Title (i.e. the name of the game)

2. Abstract (~250 words) making explicit the key historical message your game is meant to communicate

3. Game materials (choose which of the following are most pertinent)

   1. Game Design Document (based off existing template) for complex games

   2. OR an annotated Rulebook and sample prototypes for simpler analog tabletop/ card/ role-playing games

   3. OR Twine interactive fiction

   4. Propose something else and I'll consider it

Different games require different amounts of work. If your goal is a resource-heavy original digital game, your GDD will be thinking about potential features since it would be impossible to complete the entire game this semester. If you are working on a new version of the Timeline card game, however, you might be able to create a card deck, rulebook and annotations completely. Or you might put together the player manual for a role-playing game set in the wilderness of the Chilkoot Trail during the Yukon goldrush.

This kind of project will tend to be more descriptive than the other two final assignments (more analytic), so students may have the propensity to exceed the suggested ~2000 word length. As long as the GDD is not filled with extraneous material, there is no maximum length.

You are encouraged to develop the game as fully as possible and, if possible, produce a playable prototype by the end of term. Since every game is different it is difficult to offer a clear binding set of guidelines, but the key to the assessment of this assignment is that the final product:

• shows clear basis in historical research and builds off of the preparatory work done in assignments 1 and 2.

• contains sufficient information and game materials that the proposed game can be readily understood and visualized

• shows an awareness of relevant game mechanics and shows a creative willingness to innovate in service of the historical message being communicated