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Fondazione ITS INCOM

Examples · AR/VR & Game Developer

A game design document, reviewed

Paste the design document of your game into the chat with a checklist, and get a review point by point, with the sentence of your document behind every verdict. Then check the review itself: every quote, every “missing” and every sum. No code.

Beginner · 30 min

Why

Before a team builds a game, it writes down what the game is: the game design document. A model reads it in seconds and finds the holes, and it can be wrong in both directions: it can call something missing that is written two lines above, and it can call something present that is not there at all. So the review has to show its evidence, and you check the evidence.

What you need

Your ITS INCOM AI account, and the design document of your game, or the one below to try.

The model

Gemma 4 26B, the default in the chat. In our tests every sentence it quoted was really in the document. Apertus quoted sentences that were not there.

The document

A VR game for three students and eight weeks. Some holes are on purpose:

LIGHTHOUSE - game design document, version 1

Pitch: a storm is coming and the lamp of the lighthouse is broken. You are the keeper, and you have one night to repair it before a ship hits the rocks.

Platform: Meta Quest 3, standalone.

Gameplay: each level is a floor of the lighthouse. On every floor you find the broken part, carry it to the workbench, repair it in a small puzzle, and put it back. Then you climb to the next floor. The storm gets worse at every floor: rain on the windows, lightning, the tower shakes.

Controls: you move with the left joystick and turn with the right joystick. You grab objects with the grip button and use tools with the trigger.

Levels: five floors, from the cellar to the lamp room. The lamp shines again before dawn: you win.

Multiplayer: a second player can join online as the keeper's assistant, with voice chat.

Weather: the storm is generated in a different way at every game.

Art: low-poly, warm light inside, cold blue light outside.

Audio: rain, thunder, the wooden stairs creaking, a radio with messages from the ship.

Team: three students, eight weeks, two days a week.

The request

Open a new chat, choose Gemma 4 26B, and paste this, followed by the document, in the same message:

You are a senior game designer. Review this game design document with the checklist below. For each point, write: present, partly or missing; the exact sentence of the document that covers it, in quotation marks, or «none»; and one concrete suggestion.

1. Pitch: what the game is, in one or two sentences.
2. Core loop: what the player does again and again.
3. How you win and how you lose.
4. Controls, and comfort in VR: ways to move and turn for players who get motion sick.
5. Platform and performance target (frame rate).
6. Scope: does it fit the team and the time?
7. What is not in the game.

Then the three most important changes, in order.

The rule that matters is the second: the exact sentence of the document, in quotation marks. A verdict with a sentence behind it can be checked in seconds; a verdict without one has to be trusted.

What you should see

A verdict for each point, with its sentence and a suggestion. In one of our runs, the end of it:

6. Scope
   Status: Missing
   Sentence: «none»
   Suggestion: You have listed your team and time, but you haven't stated if the scope is "a polished vertical slice" or "a complete game." Given your 8-week timeline, you need to define if the multiplayer is a "nice-to-have" or a core requirement.

7. What is not in the game
   Status: Missing
   Sentence: «none»

Top 3 Critical Changes
1. Define the "Fail State" and "Scope Boundaries": [...] For a 3-person team over 8 weeks, I strongly recommend moving Multiplayer to the "Out of Scope" list [...]
2. Implement VR Comfort Alternatives: [...] You need to include Teleportation as a movement mode [...]
3. Establish Technical Performance Targets: [...] You must commit to a target frame rate (e.g., 72 FPS) in the document [...]

Every run is different, in the words and sometimes in the verdicts.

Check the review

Three checks, with the document open next to the chat.

1. Every quote is in the document. Copy each sentence in quotation marks and look for it with Ctrl+F. If it is not there, the verdict rests on nothing. With this same document, apertus-70b-instruct called the performance target present, and “quoted” it: “Performance target: 30 frames per second (fps) to ensure smooth VR experience”. The document has no frame rate at all, and 30 frames a second in a headset is a recipe for motion sickness. In another run it quoted “a continually high frame rate”, and wrote “No suggestion needed”. A quote with [...] joins two pieces of text: look for each piece.

2. Every “missing” really is missing. Look for the topic yourself. In five of our six runs, Gemma marked the scope “missing”, with no sentence, while the document says “Team: three students, eight weeks, two days a week.” The team and the time are there; what is missing is the judgement, and that is your job too. Once it marked the controls missing, in a document with a paragraph called “Controls”.

3. Every sum is redone. A review that talks about time does arithmetic. One review by qwen3.6-35b wrote “3 people * 16 weeks * 8 hours/week = 384 hours”, and one by Gemma “a student project of 96 total man-hours”: the document says eight weeks, two days a week, and no hours at all. Redo it: two days a week for eight weeks is 16 days each, 48 days of work for the team. Then decide whether 48 days are enough for five floors, online multiplayer with voice chat and a storm that is different at every game.

What is left is advice, and it is good advice: in our runs, every review by Gemma asked for a way to lose, comfort options for players who get motion sick in VR, a frame rate, and a list of what is not in the game. Which of them you follow is a decision for your team.

Then the second version

Fix the document yourself, then paste it again with the same request. When we added a way to lose (“if dawn comes and the lamp is still dark, the ship hits the rocks and you lose”), teleport and turning in steps, “72 frames per second”, three floors instead of five, and a line “Not in this version: multiplayer, a storm that changes from game to game, more than three floors”, Gemma marked every point present or partly present, each with its sentence.

Good to know

Exercise

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