SupernaturalCow
Member
Hi All,
You may have seen me recently posting on the Job Board looking for social programmers. As you might be able to surmise from the job description, it's going to involve a lot of good communication. I've been building the one project for several years now, and the code has gone completely off the grid in regards to GM's built-in scaffolding. To give you an idea, there's one object and one room, I've turned off the application surface, and I'm manually handling my view matrices. "Instances" are arrays, and classes are "objects". Objects are just heavier arrays. There's not too much value left in the GM Docs, and I'm realising I'm going to need a reliable source of information to resort to, if I'm going to have any success working with a second developer.
Now, I've written Game Design Documents before, and am well versed in the art of concept-laden verbosity. The project I am hiring for has several GDDs, one each for the various games that are being developed within it.
So, my question to you smart people: How do I write a Technical Design Document that is not overwhelming to beginner programmers, informative enough to keep them coming back, and Big Picture enough to keep us on track of our broad-stroke goals? Does anyone have any experiences with hiring fresh developers onto big projects that they'd like to share? I'm genuinely worried that all I can offer an onlooker is a brain-frying information dump.
Thanks in advance!
You may have seen me recently posting on the Job Board looking for social programmers. As you might be able to surmise from the job description, it's going to involve a lot of good communication. I've been building the one project for several years now, and the code has gone completely off the grid in regards to GM's built-in scaffolding. To give you an idea, there's one object and one room, I've turned off the application surface, and I'm manually handling my view matrices. "Instances" are arrays, and classes are "objects". Objects are just heavier arrays. There's not too much value left in the GM Docs, and I'm realising I'm going to need a reliable source of information to resort to, if I'm going to have any success working with a second developer.
Now, I've written Game Design Documents before, and am well versed in the art of concept-laden verbosity. The project I am hiring for has several GDDs, one each for the various games that are being developed within it.
So, my question to you smart people: How do I write a Technical Design Document that is not overwhelming to beginner programmers, informative enough to keep them coming back, and Big Picture enough to keep us on track of our broad-stroke goals? Does anyone have any experiences with hiring fresh developers onto big projects that they'd like to share? I'm genuinely worried that all I can offer an onlooker is a brain-frying information dump.
Thanks in advance!