An app that keeps your Game Design Document alive, connected, and exportable to your engine.
What is GDD Manager#
An app for writing Game Design Documents that don't die in the first week of production.
You describe your game in a structure that understands what skills, attributes, currencies, and recipes are, and the app exports everything to the JSON your engine consumes. Doc and game start speaking the same language.
The problem#
Almost every GDD you've ever seen ages badly. The cycle is always the same:
- Month 1: you write a beautiful doc in Notion/Word/Confluence. Lists all weapons, attributes, formulas.
- Month 3: the programmer implements "Iron Sword = 50 damage, 100 gold". The original design had 60. Nobody updates the doc.
- Month 6: the doc has 80 pages and nobody opens it anymore. Every decision lives in Discord, in the code, or in someone's head.
- Month 12: someone new joins the team. Onboarding is "just ask in chat" because the doc is wrong about 70% of the mechanics.
The core idea#
GDD Manager flips the flow: the document becomes the source of truth, and the engine consumes data from it — not the other way around.
When you change "Iron Sword: 50 → 60 damage" here, that new number goes into the exported JSON, which the game reads on the next build. There's no room for divergence because there's only one place where the number lives.
And since the app understands that it's a weapon (not just text), it can:
- validate references (does the recipe point to an item that exists?)
- show dependencies (which skills use this attribute?)
- warn about breakages (you deleted the currency, but 3 items still reference it)
Who it's made for#
| You are... | GDD Manager helps you with... |
|---|---|
| Solo indie | Getting out of the messy Notion and having one single source of truth |
| Game designer at a studio | Rich pre-production + clean technical handoff to the programming team |
| Programmer who does everything | Writing the doc ONCE and using the JSON directly in the engine |
| Hobbyist learning | Typed templates that teach the typical structure for each genre |
What it is not#
To avoid misunderstandings:
- Not a task manager — use Trello, Linear, Jira for sprints and issues.
- Not a generic wiki — Notion/Confluence cover studio onboarding and processes better.
- Not an engine — it doesn't create gameplay, just describes it. You still write the engine (Unity, Godot, Unreal, custom).
- Not a spreadsheet generator — but it exports data that fits in any spreadsheet or table in your engine.
Next steps#
Ready to get started?