keeping track of your design by creating a user manual

One of the issues I have with explaining design details to other members of my team, is that I absolutely HATE writing formal documentation.

I dont particularly know why, but it always seems that writing formal docs takes more time than just writing quick descriptions of things or making a quick sketch for a particular idea.

However this week I've found another approach to the problem: Writing a user manual!

Ok, it sounds hokey, but for some reason I can mentally make this part of my work schedule and just get it done easier because its for the final documentation that will ship with the game. Dont get me wrong though, this isnt some 100 page tome. Its simply a "how to use the software and what to expect from the controls" sort of document.

In fact, its almost entirely the kind of thing you would like to know about when designing the game!

For instance, with our current sports title (its untitled as yet, we're currently just using blocks for everything), I wanted to detail exactly which controls did which particular type of shot. How we would create things like pre and aftertouch. How powering up shots would work etc.

Strangely enough, thats exactly what the user, at least those who dig into manuals, would like to know!

So here I sit, writing "when you press button A, then keep it held and press button B, youre shot will change from a lob to a smash" kind of statements. Which are both design doc and manual fodder. I figure if I write it in the style of a manual, then any teammates should be able to grok what I mean when it comes time to implement features. This also works for things like menu flow and control.

On the subject of sports games, of which we have many planned. I dont know if youve noticed, but the MARIO branded sports games, all have a particular design of which I'm normally a fan of, have gotten into a definite design rut of late.

Let me explain a bit. You see, I've been casting around looking for design and style ideas from various sports titles and one of the obvious sports title franchises which fits my target audience style, is the nintendo sports titles based on the MARIO world. That is, cartoon cutesy style with arcade style gameplay and lots of user feedback. However they all are starting to exhibit such common behaviour that if one has a flaw they all have a flaw. Thats the case I'm going to explain now.

See, for the most part, the mario games are VERY playable, they have great control systems, are very responsive and although shallow sometimes they are very entertaining. But then comes along a design decision which is so mind-meltingly stupid I cant believe they made it.

Enter the "Special Move Shot".

Yes, that dear old character-dependant "Special Move" is a source of utter amazement to me. That nintendo would be so stupid as to break the flow of the action of a game simply to allow some character based special move shots is astounding. I dont mean just break the gameplay a bit, I mean stop it dead in its tracks!

Now I can definitely understand where they are coming from with this idea. Basically its "yeah, lets get each character to have a special move, so that they are totally different and relate the character to the player better. The cynical side of me thinks that this is merely a ploy to sell more merchandizing by simply reinforcing the player->character connection.

But to make these absurdly long special moves during which GAMEPLAY HALTS! just to play the animation?

And this isnt in just one game, oh my no. Its in Mario Tennis, Mario Baseball, Mario Soccer and probably a few others. Whats worse, is that usually the "special move" shots are just about unstoppable! So you get this powerup->specialmove->win triad going which would make me want to drop the game in a second.

I guess what most people do is have a gentlemans agreement to never allow specials.

Personally, I'm going to rip off the flavour and control schema of the Mario sports games almost wholesale for my designs. But one thing I'll definitely be leaving out is the special moves which block any player inputs!

Oh, I should have a picture, but the blocks really arent that much to look at! after xmas maybe :))

Oh, and the AI pack is coming on great. I've broken apart most of the suport code and have been fixing it into the 1.4 codebase at a deeper level than before. so basically you can have AI based gamebases, shapebases, players, vehicles, everything!!!

And Air Ace is back and alive again after KO fixed the damn camera jitter bugs. More testing on that over xmas break too!