When developing my game I noticed that certain elements the game needed to be changed through my game design document. This is a common procedure when it comes to game development. The further along the development process you go, the more detailed the information will be. You can begin to expand the document without losing it’s readability [Ella, 2014].
One of the changes I needed to make was the rocks. at first I was going to make rocks as simple sprites and import them in game maker. It seemed simple enough as all I thought it would be is a simple sprite job. Later down the line of development however I realised how much work I would have had to have put into coding the enemies to crawl over the rocks. Not only would I have to code them I would also have had to animate them stretching over the rocks in a realistic enough method.
In the end I ended up removing the rocks from the game. This is due down to not prioritizing them in the first place. When working on projects you cannot always know fore sure how hard every element will be unless you have had practice before. For future projects I can now see how much effort needs to go into game play elements as small as rocks and will think twice before sending them to the back of the prioritized list.
Another change I made was to the enemy. Through play testing the game I felt that only having 1 enemy was really boring. I received feedback from people who play tested my game and they thought the same way. I decided to add a bigger enemy to give it more of a challenge.
For the bigger enemy I made him a red colour instead of green. I also made him inflict 2 points of damage to the barriers so the game would be more challenging.
A link to my previous GDD can be found here: GDDversion1
A link to my updated GDD can be found here: GDD
References:
Ella Romanos. (2014). How to write a useful game design document.Available: http://www.develop-online.net/opinions/how-to-write-a-useful-game-design-document/0196644. Last accessed 14/01/2015.