GDD (Game Design Document)
The canonical document that captures a game's design, mechanics, content, and balance decisions. The single source of truth for a game's design intent.
A GDD is the design-side counterpart to engineering's source code. It captures the game's premise, target audience, core mechanic loop, content structure, balance numbers, narrative beats, UI flow, and progression curves. A GDD changes constantly during pre-production and stays alive through live-ops.
The operational problem with GDDs: they live in Notion or Google Docs or Confluence, get edited by multiple owners simultaneously, and have no real version control. When a balance designer changes the gold cost of a unit, no system flags that the corresponding rare-drop rate in the loot table needs to follow. When a narrative writer revises a faction's lore, no system flags that the in-game tutorial copy still references the old version.
GameFrame is built around this gap. It versions GDDs, balance spreadsheets, and narrative documents with Git-style branching, visual diffs, and 11 AI personas that review every change against the rest of the design data.