but i''m trying to figure out the best way to develop a design doc for them. i''m a programmer by trade, so is there any way i could get most of the design aspects out of the way so i can actually program a demo of my game(s)?

Look at the section "Primers & Templates for Workshops & Project" on this page :

http://www.cs.ubc.ca/spider/forsey/448/UBCSyllabus_2001.html

Hope it helps

A design doc is just a roadmap of your project. If you are a programmer, then you should have written some design documents by yourself and didn''t notice them. Did you ever had to construct a program that reads a data file, sorts the data by what the user wanted, computes an average, standard deviation of the whole thing, prints out desired numbers of interest ..etc???.. you need a design document for that, and making one for a game is not any harder.

Just break up your idea into sections. I use the old "Brain storm" technique. The circle in the middle is the project name and then you basically create a web from that with your ideas.
...just a suggestion

good luck =P