game design documents

Found this kind of randomly:

allowe.com/gamedesign/index.htm

Some of the Leisure Suit Larry game design docs. Interesting stuff.

Has anyone here ever written something like that for their IF game? About how long were the Larry games for those who’ve played them?

I made notebooks full of similar information when creating “Gathered in Darkness.”

Now, when I do it I also make another typed file and include all my room descriptions, events, and messages. This allows for easy spell and grammar check as well as basic editing of the prose. (I wish I had done that part for GID, but I have now for other projects).

When I am coding the file now I just type a little place marker instead of the full text.

define room <Mars>
	look <marsroomdes>
	up <Outer Space>

This way I can check to make sure my coding works. In the above example I would just copy and paste the actual description of Mars from my other file over the “marsroomdes.”

I don’t know if that is what you were wondering, but I found it to be somewhat similar to the cited example above.

I wouldn’t say it’s something as formal as what Al Lowe did for the LSL games, but I do have a notebook that more-or-less describes what’s going to happen in each “game” I’m planning to develop further. It has the events, hastily drawn maps, description text for rooms and NPCs (if any).

I’m looking into writing something as formal as that, but I have yet to finish an actual game. First things first :wink:

I work with design documents of all types.

I really like this method.

Does anyone know what would be involved to write a utility to automagically replace all the placeholding tags (i.e. ‘’) in the source file with the description text from the description file?

I’d buy one. Right now.

You could probably write one in a few lines of Perl.

For all the various games and things I imagine writing one day I have a notepad. Actually, the notepad was for notes from lectures, but in between there are various lists of ideas in varying degrees of detail for games. Must type them out before I lose the paper, come to think of it.

I love reading this kind of thing, too. Can’t think of that much I’ve read for IF games, though.