Living Design Doc
A GDD updated continuously throughout production to reflect the current game state, not a point-in-time spec that goes stale after the first sprint.
A living design document is a GDD that is kept current throughout a game’s production. Every system change, balance adjustment, and narrative revision is reflected in the doc. The GDD is never a historical artifact from pre-production — it is the current source of truth about what the game is.
This sounds obvious but it is hard to sustain. The GDD is written under pressure at the start of a project when everything is uncertain. Once development begins, the team is moving fast, and updating documentation feels like extra work on top of the real work. The doc goes stale. It stops being consulted. Decisions get made in Slack or in someone’s head.
A living design doc requires tooling that makes maintenance cheap. If updating the doc costs less than the alternative — confusion, regressions, duplicated decisions — teams update the doc.
How it works in Gameframe
Gameframe makes it cheap to keep a GDD current. Because every save creates a version, there is no penalty for incremental updates — you can update a balance table cell and the version history records it without disrupting anyone’s work on another branch.
The branch model helps too: speculative changes stay on a branch until they are ready to land, so the main document always reflects what is actually in the game, not what might be in the game next sprint.
Start free to see how Gameframe reduces the friction of keeping docs current.