Dissecting Metal Gear Solid 2’s Design
Document
We were told about a website from uni which hosts
various game design documents for people to read. I was so excited when I found
out Metal Gear Solid 2’s design document was posted up because I absolutely
LOVE that game!
Our current stage of development in our group project is
that we are looking deep into design documents and starting to get our headings
together so we can allocate the work we have done to those headings and figure
out what still needs to be done and what might need to be altered.
As a starting point I decided to do a design document
dissection on the MGS2 document. Here are my notes (and a trailer for the game in case you aren't familiar) which will help me and my
group finalise our main titles, headings and sub headings for our design document.
Under title, there is a short paragraph/1
sentence which explains the title.
Platform & Regions.
A development schedule outline has been
included for the development of the game.
It has covered research into the
trends of other sequels to better define their own; they list the pro's and
cons' too.
It defines it's target audience early
on in the document before even explaining the story.
It actually depicts what will attract
female players as well as male players to the game.
It talks about how it's visuals will
differ from other companies in terms of its technologies, this might not be
such a big deal with our game as A: not many games look like ours anyway and B:
it's not coming out onto new technology so we don't need ours to have a
"competition" feel to it so to speak.
It considers major focuses that they
want to take very seriously in game (creating realistic environments and
enemies). We could do a similar thing with how we want this to be a taboo
exploration/experimental game.
It talks about the strength of the
enemy AI. This would be crucial for us and our game because our enemies need to
be very clever and will often spawn into the game from Lianna's
mind.
It has a section which lists elements
of the game which will be most memorable and that will be "left and passed
onto our children".
It talks about the military with some
fairly extensive research to back up their ideas. We could include segments of
our research to back up our ideas for the characters and gameplay.
They reference a film (LA
Confidential) as an example for the structure of the story. We could include
the films we have watched to back up our ideas too.
They talk about the player of the game
and how they might become affected (one day) by what MGS2 is trying to do with
regards to digitalising the future and how one day players will blur the lines
between fantasy and reality.
It lists the game world as a title
then includes sub headings which are time & settings as well as different
chapters of the game, Further subheadings include time frame/year, setting,
characters, play time, objectives and gameplay flowcharts.
It talks about the state of the MGS
world and how it affects the game.
They include an in-depth back story.
There is a section for the
gameplay/plot and how the player will progress through specific areas of the
game but then there is interestingly also a section called "in truth"
where the whole story/bigger picture is revealed to you so that the gameplay/plot
makes more sense. This would be good for our design document as our game isn't
simple and would benefit from an "whereas in real life Lianna is actually
mentally ill (possibly)" etc.
When describing the enemies in game
(not the research which has influenced them) there are short bullet points
which describe their actions, expressions, how they patrol, how they move, how
they react to you, how you can interact with them etc.
Under the players description section
it talks about how the movement of the character will come from specific
buttons/analogue sticks, how they can interact with enemies and other NPC's,
what sort of things the player can interact with throughout the world etc.
It lists things such as radar, camera
and cut scenes as separate headings under "an overview of changes to the
system" which I guess would be the equivalent to our gameplay section as
all these elements are gameplay related.
There is list of characters, some with
an in-depth description of their character and others with a 1 line sentence depicting them, it also lists
where they are encountered in the game.
It even goes as far as listing
possible animal encounters (most of which have nothing to do with the game and
are purely there for environment/aesthetics).
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