How can you use game mechanics documentation to onboard new team members?

In my experience, one of the crucial ways to be able to build a good GDD that provides cursory information on specific subjects like Stats, Quest Mechanics, Damage Calculation etc then further link to the detailed charts and tables from there as separate documents. This provides a great overview that facilitates cross team understanding of the general game objectives and allows them to deep dive into a specific subject where necessary.

Game Mechanics Documentation (GMD) shouldn't be confused with Game Design Document (GDD), as one is part of the bigger picture. You can list game mechanics in your GDD first, then document them in other media such as wiki-formats through Notion or Obsidian if you prefer the node-based visuals. GMDs will differ to who you present them to, as your engineers will want concepts as much as detailed possible, yet stakeholders want the "cool" and profitable factor of your mechanics, as you want to both sell your idea and push it to development.

La documentación de mecánicas de juego es una habilidad crítica y subestimada. Demostrar la capacidad de comunicar de manera efectiva las complejas mecánicas y sistemas de un juego muestra un enfoque metódico y una comprensión profunda de la industria. Además, refleja tu habilidad para trabajar en equipo al facilitar la colaboración entre dise?adores, artistas y desarrolladores. En un entorno altamente competitivo como la industria de los videojuegos, la documentación precisa y concisa puede marcar la diferencia en la creación de juegos exitosos.

Treat game mechanic documentation as the foundation of your design. When you place guidelines it makes it easier for you to determine which people to bring on for your team. Not only does it make the process faster but it eliminates any confusion and miscommunication later down the line. Game Mechanic Documentation is incredibly important and all teams should have a document to go off of to streamline development.

Every documentation is important, specially for version control and progress throughout a limited budget and set schedule. You want the team to have a "checkpoint" to refer to every time there's a change, specifically to not distort the main purpose of the way the game will be played. This also makes things as consistent as possible and gets new additions to the team up-to-date in a constructed manner.

To start, a word of caution. The most up-to-date game design document is the game itself! Make sure new team members play the game. Keeping documentation current, especially in the early stages, can be a full-time job. Make sure you balance updating Docs and actually working on the game. We created our vision document in Notion. Using its nested tables and synced blocks feature, we were able to create a high-level document that automatically updates when we changed the details in the nitty-gritty. I also suggest using the “verified until” feature to communicate which pages are older, and need refreshing.

As I've mentioned earlier, both Notion and Obsidian are great tools to document your game. I personally prefer Notion, but you can add whatever tool makes documenting the game easier. Not everything needs to be documented to the tiniest detail, as time is money and you want to design more and write less. Scheduling updates it's also important, as going from one version to another without documenting it, might create future issues for both the team and the game development.

It's usually beneficial to assign one person who onboards people into the documentation environment the dev team is using to make sure it all is there and that there is a clear connection between the full dev team and the new arrival(s).

Communication, as everything in this world, is key. You'll have to do some UX with both existing and new members of a game's development, as researching what works or not will go a long way in writing a clean and useful GMD. Empathy during this process is also quite crucial.

Always keep in mind that not every project, team and genre works the same. That being said, a GMD for a MOBA game will be completely different (and necessary) compared to a puzzle-story driven game. Iteration leads to consistency and polished products and the same applies to GMDs. Don't overstep your team's experience with the documents, don't spend more time writing it than designing the game and it's also good to ask other teams/ studios that work in similar genres as you do, how they build their documents. And have fun! Documenting something can be gratifying if you focus in the progress of the development and see how far you've came in your project.