I’ve been wondering myself about a better Design Document implementation. Put aside never-ending argument on what actually goes into DD, how detailed it should be etc. I wanted to concentrate on the software implementation of things.

Word, Wiki, Hypertext and Structured Text: all have their cons and pros as a possible format of DD. What they have in common though is they all are generic formats/tools ready to be used for whatever purpose not only for DDs.

What we need is a specific implementation that covers the needs of DD users/creators. A good example is Dramatica – special software that is a custom solution for book writers or Screenwriter – same thing but for screenwriters.

It seems to me that we need a custom solution just like the ones mentioned above. Notice, I’m not talking about concrete implementation or format – the tools should be selected only after we figure out the tasks we need DD to be able to perform.

First we need to figure out what a “perfect” DD should be. What features, use cases and formats should it cover. Then based on this list we can cook-up a structure that would be specific to DD users/writers

Here’s a start of a long list of things I personally would like the DD to have.

- Be able easily edited by all members of a project (spell check, visual formatting structure definition)
- Minimal learning curve for formatting language.
- Easy version control and tracking or changes.
- Uniform and flexible serialization format (probably XML).
- Easy cross-reference of fragments and reference insertion.
- Auto generation of TOC (see “Views”)
- Insertion of images, code, diagrams, other parts of the document or other documents and their fragments.
- Multiple “Views” of sections/document. More specifically – each section can have different paragraphs describing an item for different users i.e. Managers; Artists; Programmers. The “View” is basically a filter that can be set by user to display only what user needs to see and based on User’s role.
- Printable presentation PDF/RTF

And DD is not the only document specific to the industry that seams to need a better implementation. Many in game story/plots need a very specific implementation of format: being non-linear and all. Plus they require lots of dialog choices/content which makes sense to keep separately for easier integration with code. All those documents probably need to be interlinked and connected for ease of use. But that is a subject for another time.

If this sounds interesting to anyone, please post you list of features. It would be interesting to see specifically what people want their DD should be capable of. Once again – I’m not talking about the “content” of the DD, but its functional specifications.

If any programmer here wants to tackle the above, I have ten years of career graphic design experience under my belt and I'm willing to design the spec templates for output (of the design document) to digital and printed formats. Software for game design similar to Business Plan Pro would definitely be a treat for the industry.

This probably isn't quite what you're looking for, but for some reason I was reminded of Freemind, an open-source mind-mapping software. It's an interesting way of organizing ideas.

http://freemind.sourceforge.net/wiki/index.php/Main_Page

Quote:

Original post by nife Quote: Original post by RolandofGilead I am looking for something as well, as I do not have Microsoft Word. A Wiki sounds good, but what about something portable as I might not be able to install a wiki at every computer I happen to sit in front of. @slayemin: What html editor do you use? I thought about using html but figured all the color, font, and spacing stuff would get in the way(I really know nothing about this format, or its editors). Instead of the expensive Office Package, you could use the OpenOffice (openoffice.org I think). It has most of the capabilities that Office has.

And AbiWord is a great, lightweight, free open source program if you're just interested in the word processor component. It's got a lot of the functionality of MS Word, full support for the DOC format, its most obvious exception being the grammar checker.

Did anyone saw this: http://www.gamexml.org and the MORPH schema? Sounds interesting, although it looks like project is not moving anywhere.

I've been trying to get zwiki working on Gentoo - it mostly works though the edit link sometimes disappears and there doesn't seem to be any easy way of adding a logon link.

I'm also trying "Plone" but I can't seem to get it to have wiki documents, though it is a very pretty system - being much more then just a wiki and still open source.

Any hints / tips on these products or do u reckon I should start another thread to ask?

http://plone.org/

As you say that you don't have MS Word, you should heavily consider OpenOffice, I used it to create a Design Document for a previous project. I have to say its much better in a lot of ways than MS Word and I prefer it, I personally regard it as handling large documents with considerable ease, something MS Word does not always do well.

The version I used was 1.1, but I think its at 1.1.4 now, well worth looking at.