One Pager

After the initial concept stages of the GD-1, your team will want to have more details about the game. While the GD-1 is great for getting ideas out quickly, it’s hard to share and lacks information about the game’s final form. On the other hand, when we start working on the more extensive documentation of the GD-4 (such as feature briefs), it’s already too late to make grand changes to the game. The one pager is an intermediate step during GD-2, giving a bit more information on the project, but still simple, easy and quick to make.

As its name suggests, the one pager attempts to explain the game in a single page. As opposed to concept slides, the one pager is meant to be read (not presented) and shared with every stakeholder of the project. The main audience is the managers, publishers, marketing and producers who need to know exactly what the game will be about. There are two reasons why we limit the file to one page:

• First, at that length, you’re almost certain people will read it. A common issue with old art bibles is that (at tens or hundreds of pages long), most team members would not go through them. With one page, everyone should have the time and stamina to go over it.
• Second, this forces the designer to only include the most important aspects to understand the game. You have to be efficient and focused. This protects the process from early over-designing; we want to make sure everyone who’s working on it has bought in before we go full throttle into the details.

A typical one pager should include the following information:

• Game title & logo
• Genre
• Platform & distribution
• Target audience
• Premise
• Setting/World
• Visual Style
• Core loop / Gameplay overview
• Key features / Unique selling points (i.e. the hooks)
• Competitive Analysis
• Development team
• Project Status
• Monetization
• Contact Information/Company logo

Depending on the game itself, you can include other sections. For example, if you’re working on a narrative heavy game, then having a snippet of the story makes sense or if your game has unique visuals, you can include a small mockup (although be careful with the space this might take).

One pagers have been used from a long time ago, probably inherited from the marketing or movie industry, where lots of ideas have to be pitched really quickly. I have not been able to find the first person to use them.

Although a one pager can be a single page of text, I’ve found more success when there’s a little bit of layout design behind it. Not only does it allow for more efficient information layout, it’s also more inviting for others to read. If you have the skills, spend that extra bit of time to make it look nice. For inspiration on how to visualize information, check out Edward Tufte’s books. As you’ll see below, I do not have the skills.

1. Gather the appropriate information
2. Lay it out in a word document (helps with spell checking and controlling the word count)
3. Move it to a graphic program and adjust the layout.
4. Share it with the stakeholders.

Remember that for this document, you won’t be present when people read it; if people are asking questions about what the document contains, then you need to iterate on the information presented.

Let’s imagine that we are working on an adventure game in the style of LucasArts games of the early 90s.

Instead of time travel however, our game will be a whacky sci-fi crime thriller, where players have to interact with different alien species (who communicate in different ways) to commit a heist. With that in mind, a one pager might look like this:

One caveat: my art skills are….. poor. So I used AI to generate a screenshot and made a very rough game and company logo; if you can, find someone who can really nail the look of your own one pagers.

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