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by killion 490 days ago
I loved the first and last page...

[first] "This report, by its very length, defends itself against the risk of being read." -Winston Churchill

[last] "To protect this document, please restrict your fallen tears of joy to this box. Thank you!"

1 comments

It is honestly one of my favorite documents. With the thought put behind it, it is of no surprise the game was such a well crafted masterpiece.

Most software work tends to move away from this kind of ... I don't want to say documentation, we have better documentation tools than ever, more-so a level of writing in general that is more 'human', be it written documents at length or well commented code.

Another one is `The Sims` https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43064273

I recall a Warcraft III one I once saw, that went into technical details on the tooling/scripting packaged with the game. That was another great document too, but I don't have it :)

I got to ogle a game design doc for a Sonic the Hedgehog game that was never produced. And yeah its very similar, except it had way more visual layout. Absolutely everything sonic could do was amazingly visualised and described.
I feel a game like FF7 which came out in this era didn't have a document like this. OR if it did, it was put together AFTER the game was finished.