CHAPTER 5: The Design Document
George needed to write a Game Design Document.
Not the notes in the marbled notebook, which were a raw memory dump, disorganized, full of arrows and crossed-out lines and paragraphs that broke off mid-sentence when a new idea jumped in. He needed a formal document. Something he could show an artist and have them understand exactly what sprites they needed to create. Something he could send to a composer so they would know what kind of music to write for each zone. Something that, if George fell down the stairs tomorrow and cracked his skull, would let another person understand the game and finish it.
It was Thursday, March 19th. He had been in 1998 for five days and had not written a single line of code. That had to change, but code without a plan was like building a house without blueprints: possible, but stupid. George knew this from experience. He had watched multimillion-dollar projects at Ubisoft collapse because no one took the time to document the vision before production started.
The problem was the medium. A document like this needed to be written on a computer, not by hand. It needed structure, a table of contents, clear sections. And it needed to be easily editable. George opened Microsoft Word 97, which came preinstalled with Windows, and started a new document.
On the first page, centered, in the largest font size Word allowed without looking ridiculous, he typed: CASTLEVANIA: SYMPHONY OF THE NIGHT -- Game Design Document. New Game Studios. March 1998. Author: George Hightower.
He stared at the screen. His name next to the name of the game. A game that was not his. A game that had been born in the mind of Koji Igarashi in a Konami office in Japan, in a world that no longer existed for George. A game that Igarashi and his team had created with their own talent, effort, and vision, and which George was about to claim as if it were his own.
The guilt rose through his chest like cold water.
He pushed it back down. He had no time for moral crises. In this world, Konami was not going to create this game. Igarashi was not going to design it. Michiru Yamane was not going to compose the music. The development team was not going to spend months polishing every sprite, every animation, every frame of every boss fight. None of that was going to happen. If George didn't do it, Castlevania: Symphony of the Night would simply not exist. And the world would be worse for it.
That was what he told himself. He wasn't entirely sure he believed it.
But he opened the document and began to write.
* * *
The first section of any GDD is the overview: a one-or-two-page summary explaining what the game is, who it's for, and why anyone would want to play it. It's the section a publisher reads before deciding whether to turn to page three. It's the section an artist reads to know if the project interests them. It is, in essence, the elevator pitch put into writing.
George wrote:
Castlevania: Symphony of the Night is a 2D action, exploration, and RPG game for PC. The player controls Alucard, the son of the vampire Dracula, as he explores an enormous, non-linear castle. Unlike traditional platformers, the player does not advance left to right through predefined levels: they have complete freedom to explore the castle in any direction, discovering new areas, enemies, and secrets as they acquire new abilities.
The game combines the precision of a real-time action game with the depth of an RPG: the character levels up, acquires equipment, learns abilities, and transforms into supernatural creatures. The castle is an interconnected world where each zone has its own visual and sonic identity, and where exploration is rewarded with secrets, shortcuts, and environmental storytelling.
The target audience is PC players looking for a deep, atmospheric, and replayable experience. The game offers between 15 and 25 hours of content on a first playthrough, with additional hidden content that encourages multiple runs.
George reread what he had written. It was clear, concise, and described a type of game that did not exist in this world. There was nothing to compare it to. He couldn't say "it's like Metroid but with RPG elements" because Metroid didn't exist here. He couldn't say "it's a metroidvania" because that word meant nothing. He had to explain the concept from scratch, as if he were inventing it.
Because, for all practical purposes, he was.
* * *
The second section was the narrative. George wrote the story of Castlevania with a familiarity that made his fingers fly across the keyboard.
The year is 1797. Dracula's castle has appeared mysteriously, four years after the vampire hunter Richter Belmont destroyed it. Alucard, Dracula's son, who had entered a voluntary sleep to prevent his dark power from harming the world, awakens upon sensing the castle's presence. He enters his father's fortress to discover why it has returned and stop whoever is responsible.
As Alucard explores the castle, he discovers that Richter Belmont is inside, apparently as its new lord. The truth is darker: Richter has been mentally controlled by Shaft, a dark priest who seeks to resurrect Dracula. If the player confronts Richter without uncovering the truth, they receive a false ending. If they discover Shaft's manipulation, the Inverted Castle is revealed: a mirror version of the castle, more dangerous, where Alucard must destroy Shaft and finally confront his own father.
The story culminates in the battle between Alucard and Dracula. Father against son. Darkness against the choice to be something more than your inheritance. With his dying breath, Dracula asks about Lisa, Alucard's mother, the human woman he loved. Alucard tells him her last words were of forgiveness. Dracula fades, and Alucard leaves the castle, choosing to live in a world that will always see him as a monster.
George stopped writing. He realized he was moved. Not by the story itself, which he knew by heart, but by the act of putting it into his own words, of giving it shape in a document that would eventually become a real game that real people would play. In his previous life, the story of Symphony of the Night had moved him at fifteen, when he played it for the first time. At forty-nine, it was still one of the finest narratives in the history of video games. And now he was going to bring it to life in a world that had never known it.
* * *
The third section was the longest and most technical: the game systems. Here George had to translate what he knew of the original game into specifications that a programmer, himself, and an artist could implement.
He started with movement. Alucard could walk, run, crouch, jump, backdash, attack in multiple directions, and eventually transform into a wolf, a bat, and mist. Each of these actions needed specific animation frames, defined hitboxes, and rules for interacting with the environment. George detailed every state: how many frames a jump lasted, how many invincibility frames the backdash had, how fast the wolf moved compared to the human form.
He didn't have the exact numbers from the original game. Those details had blurred with time. But he had something better: the feel. He knew what it felt like to control Alucard. He knew the jump had a specific weight, neither too floaty nor too stiff. He knew the backdash was fast and responsive, a survival tool that became second nature. He knew the transformations had to feel like extensions of the character, not like generic power-ups.
He wrote all of that. Not as numbers in a table but as descriptions of sensations: "the jump should feel committed; once in the air, the player has limited directional control", "the backdash is instantaneous and covers a fixed distance; the player should feel it is a viable option in any combat situation", "the bat transformation should feel liberating; the player goes from being confined by gravity to having total freedom of movement".
This kind of description was not standard in GDDs from 1998. Design documents of the era tended to be dry lists of features and technical specifications. But George knew, from twenty years of experience, that the difference between a good game and an extraordinary one lay in the feel, in the tactile response the player felt with every input. And that couldn't be captured with numbers but with language.
* * *
The map section was the one that took the most time.
George moved from the notebook to the computer, redrawing the zone diagram as a flow map. Each zone had its own subsection in the document: name, visual description, suggested color palette, enemies that appeared, important items it contained, associated music, and connections to other zones.
Marble Gallery: The first zone after the castle entrance. Aesthetic of a decadent ballroom: marble floors, chandeliers, statues, tattered curtains. Cool color palette: grays, blues, touches of gold. Enemies: skeletons, zombies, bats. Music: something elegant but corrupted, like a waltz going out of tune.
Long Library: An endless library with bookshelves extending upward beyond the screen. Enemies: flying books, specters, a mini-boss who is a skeletal librarian. The zone is vertical: the player climbs through platforms between shelves. Palette: warm browns, parchment, touches of red. Music: melancholic, contemplative, with a string instrument as the main theme.
Clock Tower: Giant gears serving as moving platforms. The zone is a challenge of timing and precision. Enemies: harpies, medusa heads, animated gears. Palette: metals, coppers, rust. Music: mechanical, rhythmic, with metallic percussion imitating the sound of the gears.
Zone by zone, George built a castle out of words. Each description was an instruction for the artist he had not yet found: this is how it has to look, this is how it has to feel, this is the emotion I want the player to have when they walk into this room. And each musical description was a letter to the composer he had not yet met: this is what I need you to do with sound, this is what words cannot capture but music can.
When he finished the map section, he had written descriptions for fourteen main zones plus the Inverted Castle as a general concept. The document was already twenty-three pages long.
* * *
The enemy section was an exercise in prioritization.
The original game had over two hundred unique enemies. George could not recreate all of them, not with a team of one and a half people and a ramen budget. He needed to decide which ones were essential and which could be cut or combined.
He divided the enemies into three categories. The essentials were those that defined the identity of each zone: the skeletons of the Marble Gallery, the medusa heads of the Clock Tower, the fleamen of the Catacombs. Without them, the zones would lose their personality. These were non-negotiable.
The desirables were enemies that enriched the variety but could be cut if time or budget got tight: different types of armor, color variants of basic enemies, decorative creatures that posed no real threat.
The dispensables were enemies that existed in the original game mainly to fill space or that required a disproportionate number of sprites relative to their importance in the game.
Of the two hundred original enemies, George reduced the list to eighty essentials, forty desirables, and discarded the rest. Eighty enemies was still an enormous number for a single artist, but each could be designed with a relatively compact sprite sheet: between four and eight animation frames for the basic ones, between twelve and twenty for the more complex.
The bosses were another matter. Each boss fight was an event: a climactic moment that required large sprites, multiple phases, unique attack patterns, and its own musical piece. George documented seven main bosses for the normal castle and five for the inverted one, plus the false ending against Richter and the final battle against Dracula. Fourteen boss fights in total. Each had its own subsection with visual description, attack patterns by phase, weaknesses, and notes on the desired atmosphere.
* * *
On Friday night, George took a break from Word and picked up paper and pencil.
He couldn't draw. He had never been able to and at this point it was an accepted fact, like gravity or taxes. But a GDD without reference images was an incomplete GDD, so he sat on the futon with a pad of loose sheets and a number two pencil and tried to draw Alucard.
The result was pitiful. A stick figure with long hair and a cape that looked like a towel draped over his shoulders. The arms were different lengths. The sword looked like a baseball bat. The legs had an anatomically improbable angle.
George tore out the sheet, crumpled it into a ball, and threw it on the floor.
He tried again. This time he focused not on anatomy but on proportions and silhouette. Alucard was tall, lean, with a presence that communicated both nobility and menace. The cape was a key visual element: it moved with him, accented every gesture, enveloped him when he stood still. The sword was elegant, not crude. The hair was white, long, with movement of its own.
The second attempt was less pitiful. It still looked nothing like professional artwork, but it at least communicated the idea: a tall caped figure, sword, long hair, and a pose suggesting dangerous stillness. George looked at it with a critical eye. It was not art. It was a visual instruction. And as an instruction, it worked.
He did the same with three basic enemies, a boss, and a very rough mockup of how a room in the game might look: floor tiles, a background, a couple of platforms, Alucard in the center, an enemy to the right. It was ugly. It was clear. A talented artist could look at this and understand the vision.
He scanned the drawings at the university library scanner the next day, his apartment had no scanner, and inserted them into the Word document. The GDD was starting to look like a real document.
* * *
The last section of the GDD was the technical specification: how the game was going to be built.
George wrote with the ease of someone who has read and written hundreds of technical documents over the course of a career.
Platform: PC (Windows 95/98). Resolution: 640x480, 16-bit color. Engine: proprietary, developed in C++ with DirectX 5/6 for rendering and input, and tracker format (IT/MOD) for audio. 32x32 pixel tile system for the map. Sprites with individual animation frames in BMP format. Game loop at a fixed 60 frames per second.
He detailed the engine architecture: a main game loop that updated logic and rendered graphics separately, an entity system to manage the player, enemies, and items, a tile-based map manager with support for multiple parallax layers, a rectangle-based collision system, and an audio player for the tracker files.
He also included a minimum system requirements section: Pentium 166 MHz, 32 MB of RAM, 200 MB of disk space, a DirectSound-compatible sound card, Windows 95 or higher. Requirements that any mid-range PC from 1998 met without difficulty.
And at the end, a risks and contingencies section. What would happen if the budget ran out before the game was finished. Which zones could be cut without destroying the experience. Which enemies were dispensable. What the minimum viable product was: the normal castle without the inverted one, with the seven main bosses, seventy enemies, and ten zones instead of fourteen. A smaller but complete game, that could be expanded later if sales justified it.
George had learned that at Ubisoft: always have a plan B. Always know which game you can finish even if everything goes wrong.
* * *
On Sunday, March 22nd, after having lunch with his parents, Margaret made roast chicken this time, and Richard casually asked how classes were going, which was his way of saying he was glad George was there, George went back to the apartment and reviewed the complete document.
Castlevania: Symphony of the Night -- Game Design Document. Forty-seven pages. Overview, narrative, game systems, detailed map of fourteen zones, eighty essential enemies, fourteen boss fights, complete RPG system, technical specifications, estimated budget, development timeline, risks and contingencies. Six scanned sketches. A map flow diagram.
He printed it on the inkjet printer connected to his PC, an Epson Stylus Color 600 that made a sound like an asthmatic cat and took forty-five minutes to spit out the forty-seven pages. George picked them up from the floor where they had fallen one by one, sorted them, stapled them with a stapler he had to borrow from the neighbor, and held them in his hands.
It was heavy. Not just physically. It was the weight of a possible future. Of a different life. Of a promise he was making to himself with every page.
George set the document on the desk, next to the marbled notebook, next to the beige PC tower, next to the Final Fantasy VII poster. He looked at it from his chair with his arms crossed, like an architect looking at the blueprints of a building that doesn't exist yet but is already real in his mind.
Forty-seven pages describing a game no one in this world had imagined. A game that, if George managed to build it, would create an entire genre, launch a studio, and prove that 2D games were not dead, that exploration and atmosphere mattered as much as the polygons and 3D textures the industry was chasing like a dog chasing a car.
But forty-seven pages were not a game. They were a promise. And George knew, better than anyone, the brutal distance between a promise and its fulfillment.
Tomorrow the week started. This week, in addition to classes and Wednesday lunch with Claire, he was going to do something he had been putting off for a week.
He was going to register New Game Studios.
Because a game needed a studio. A studio needed a name. And a name needed to exist legally before it could mean anything.
George turned off the light and got into the futon. The document rested on the desk, lit by the light from the street. Forty-seven pages of a future that did not yet exist but that, with each passing day, felt less like a dream and more like a plan.
End of Chapter 5