Redesigning the GDD

Today I worked on the game design document for my game Tutel.

Tutel's demo is close to being complete, and a version of its GDD already exists, however, it needs reworking.

Due to unforeseen circumstances which caused instability within the team and our workflow, I had to change gears and step up to the project management role. As we had little time left and a lot of work to catch up on I ended up putting the design work straight into the Trello, rather than a document for it to then inform the Trello. We then ended up making a GDD retrospectively. This was for a module last semester.

This semester I am continuing the project with a single teammate, so we have to refactor the Trello, prioritising what's essential and scaling down from five members to two. So in attempting to refactor the board, I realised that I need to extract the design work from the board back into the GDD to preserve it - and then we can trim the fat from the board.

In retrospect, I should have not skipped the GDD making step as now it's come back to haunt us, however, time was limited and the team disjointed, so I did what took the least amount of time in an attempt to get the team together and the project to the finish line (it got us from only 10-20% of the way to the finish line, to 90% of the way there).