Being a guy with a background in business as an entrepreneur, I’ve written my share of documents and plans. Now that I’m game development, I’ve noticed a lot of similarities between business plans and game design documents. Not only are the documents aiming to do similar things ie. plan things , having to write either one is always a bit of a pain. I’ve been recently challenged to do 10 game prototypes this month which also requires 10 GDDs to made. Somehow that reminded me of having to write a bunch of business plans back in the day and using Alexander Osterwalder’s Business Model Canvas as a bit of a shorter one page alternative for quick analysis of business models as well as Ash Maury’s Lean Canvas for my start ups.
That led me to think, if business plans and GDDs are so similar, why can’t I use the idea of a canvas for prototyping games? So on March 20th, 2013, I walked into the class at triOS college and drew up a standard business model/lean canvas on the white board before slowly redesigning the canvas for game prototyping. By the end of the day and some input from others, I’ve managed to get 8 revisions of the canvas and began cranking out a few game prototypes of my own. Two days later, I’ve managed to get two more revisions that I finally thought was refined enough to share.