The Illinois of Art, Chicago	Game Prototyping
	Instructor: Lindsay Grace

 

Media Design Document

The Media Design Document or MDD is your opportunity to specify the artistic expectations of the games.  It’s similar to a packing list before a big trip. You are trying to identify all the visual and audio assets that will be created or purchased for the game. Like much of the documentation in the game development and project management world, the Media Design Document does not have a set format.  At the minimum, here’s what the document should contain:

• A list of all art (2D art, 3D models, environments, etc)
  
• A list of all sounds
  
• The relationship of those objects to the game

One of the benefits of the media design document is that helps to clarify your design document. Once upon a time games were built by little teams and the experience could be spec’d in a neat little document. The art might have even been created by the same person who coded the game and perhaps authored the sound and music.  As you know this isn’t true anymore.  For some, large AAA teams putting everything about the game into a single design document is too much. Instead the content is divided into a few logical parts:

• Design
  
• Art
  
• Development
  

This is similar to the pattern maintained by other software projects.  In website development, for example, there might be a business spec, a development spec and an asset spec. In both cases, there might also be one person responsible for each high-level focus.  The game design would be responsible for the Design Document, the Art lead for the MDD, and the development lead for the development spec.  The titles and specific of jurisdiction change, but the general concept is the same.

  
As current cross-company research indicates it is not practical to expect to spec the entire game at the start. As you now, designs change, technical hurdles happen, and the world changes quickly. Trying to do so is like trying to create a packing list for every conceivable situation.  What’s most reasonable is to plan to the best of your ability and understand there is a slight margin of error. At least we hope the margin of error is slight. 

For your media design document you must answer the basic questions:

• What assets will I need for the scope I have determined?
• Can I re-use any of those assets (e.g. retexture the same models for variety)

You will follow the media design document with a rough Art-Pipeline. We will talk more about the Art-Pipeline in the following week, but here is a preview of what you will be working toward. If the Media Design Document is your packing list, the art-pipeline is your road map. It is a workflow document for integrating all your assets and specifying how those assets should be authored (e.g. texture sizes, polycounts,etc)

• The quick and dirty Wikipedia article
• An Eidos job for an Art Pipeline Programmer
• Casual thoughts on art-pipeline and the technical artist

you might find the following books useful in your career and in understanding how to create an art pipeline and MDD for this class:

• The Game Animator's Guide to Maya
• The Game Artist's Guide to Maya

Honestly, I've only browsed them, I haven't read them yet.

Torque Users, you might want to take a look at Constructor.

 

Provided by Lindsay Grace for students of the Illinois Institute of Art, Chicago. These documents may be used by others when properly credited. Please email lgrace at aii edu for more information.