Pinboard (DirkSonguer)

Game Design Docs II

DirkSonguer — 2018-06-22T08:44:17+00:00

In the last post, I talked a bit about my game design documents for Vespers, although technically they’re really more like level design documents. Vespers doesn’t have levels, of course, but it does have Acts that are organized chronologically, so design docs for each Act help to organize the content and action into discrete compartments. I thought this would be an interesting look at how the game is structured, where the action takes place, and how the docs have helped in the design and development of the game.

Jacob Kaplan-Moss

DirkSonguer — 2018-06-21T17:46:52+00:00

I love Django’s documentation. It clocks in at about 700 pages printed, and most of it is clear, concise, and helpful. I think Django’s among the best documented open source projects, and nothing makes me prouder.

If any part of Django endures, I hope it’ll be a sort of “documentation culture” — an ethos that values great, well-written documentation. To that end, I’m writing a series of articles laying out the tools, tips, and techniques I’ve learned over the years I’ve spent helping to write Django’s docs.

This advice will mostly be targeted towards those documenting libraries or frameworks intended for use by other developers, but much of it probably applies to any for of technical documentation.

1 | Watch: An Interactive Documentary Modeled On Internet Porn | Co.Design: business + innovation + design

DirkSonguer — 2013-05-23T12:22:53+00:00
It’s an artful documentary steeped in the traditions of cinéma vérité. But to anyone looking over your shoulder, you’ll just be watching porn. I Love Your Work, by Jonathan Harris, profiles the lives of nine women who produce lesbian pornography. It’s roughly six hours of footage, all broken down into 2,202 separate 10-second clips captured five minutes apart.

Team Meat (Super Meat Boy!) - Watch this now!

DirkSonguer — 2011-06-28T05:14:13+00:00
Holy god.. that trailer makes me relive so many horrible memories.. yet is just so awesome. For those of you who dont know, Tommy and i were both documented by a tiny 2 person team called Blink Works on and off for about a year during the middle-end of development of Super Meat Boy. We met them at GDC the year we lost at the IGF.. they approached us after the loss and told us they were thinking about doing a short documentary about indie games. They had been talking to many indie devs and wanted to do something that could show the world the life of an indie game designer, we agreed and they followed us back to santa cruz. For the next 9+ months of development our lives were peppered with their cameras and almost sickeningly kind and gentle nature (they are Canadian).

Flark Design » Blog Archive » Stop Calling Them Design Docs - Knowing the game — by Mike Birkhead

DirkSonguer — 2011-06-25T16:51:49+00:00
And start calling them Design Tools. Docs get appended, while Tools are put aside as needs change. Design docs are necessary, but their definition is both antiquated and inadequate to the task they provide. In fact, their task–as tools–is threefold, and it worries me that none of this was explained to me. A game designers job goes through three major periods: figuring out what the hell you are making, getting the team on board with the initial idea, and then managing the vision as the game is redesigned (like, a lot – a LOT a lot); similarly, your documentation, as the project goes through these stages, serves three purposes: extrapolation, communication, and collation.

Lost Garden: Game Design Logs

DirkSonguer — 2011-05-04T13:33:36+00:00
If you still practice or encourage the outdated practice of writing long design documents, you are doing your team and your business a grave disfavor. Long design docs embody and promote an insidious world view: They make the false claim that the most effective way to make a game is to create a fixed engineering specification and then hand that off to developers to implement feature by bullet-pointed feature.

Joystick Division - Five Essential Video Game Documentaries

DirkSonguer — 2011-02-09T08:50:14+00:00
It's hard to keep track of every event in gaming's past. The industry has grown, fallen, and expanded for over forty years, and it shows no signs of stopping. The are many wonderful books that follow extensive history of video games, but we'd like to talk about five films that should be watched for a holistic view of the medium. Some of these films may be hard to track down, but check them out if you can because they will make you understand the way other people play games.

Category:Qt - Forum Nokia Wiki

DirkSonguer — 2011-01-12T05:55:28+00:00
This page presents all the articles in the Forum Nokia Wiki that include the category Qt (including Qt for Symbian, Qt for Maemo, Qt Quick and Qt Mobility). If new to Qt technology, besides the information presented here, check also the Qt Technology Landing Page in Forum Nokia. Contribute, new or improve existing ones, topical "Qt" ("Qt for Symbian" and "Qt for Maemo") articles, tutorials, how to's and code examples to make this section live and truly valuable.

XPath Tutorial

DirkSonguer — 2010-07-06T09:15:49+00:00
XPath is used to navigate through elements and attributes in an XML document. XPath is a major element in W3C's XSLT standard - and XQuery and XPointer are both built on XPath expressions.

Flickr Services - Flickr API documentation

DirkSonguer — 2009-01-06T15:48:47+00:00
Die Flickr API kann von anderen Entwicklern zu nicht kommerziellen Zwecken verwendet werden. Eine kommerzielle Nutzung ist nach vorheriger Absprache möglich.