Game Developer editor-in-chief Danielle Riendeau assembles working designers to make the case that the monolithic design bible is dead but the Game Design Document isn’t — it just has to be rebuilt as a living, searchable, scannable communication artifact rather than a spec. The mechanism is a component walkthrough anchored in Stone Librande’s one-page-design philosophy: vision statement and logline up front, player-experience goals as the beacon for hard decisions, rough maps and mood boards for the world, player “verbs” and flowcharts for mechanics, and media lists for UI and audio — with the rule that every section exists to communicate the vision to every discipline, not to check a box. The punchline is the honest counterpoint the piece includes: developers who skip GDDs entirely argue design doesn’t become real until it survives playtesting, so the doc’s real job is the harder one — getting everyone to agree on what problems the game is trying to solve — and if you can align on that, the format barely matters.