When working in a team of developers, or even when hoping to succeed with a single developer project it's important to have an overall common shared concept of what the final game is going to be like. Of course, this being games development, this is open to change during the creative process, but the specification of the game describes what the game is, how it's going to work, whats going to make it fun and what's going to keep people coming back. This is especially true when working with distributed group of contributors.

Before the Java folks start jumping around, I'm not talking about software design/specification here. For small games it's often not worth worrying about software design documentation since the majority of it is just following known patterns that most capable developers don't really have to think about. For larger ones software specifications are still only largely interesting to the developers. The game specification sets the mood/feel of the game which should feed into every aspect (art, sound, development, etc.)

Anyway, this came up due to yet another conincidence. Yesterday someone was asking about how to write them, and today I was hopefully joining a team thats developing a game which needs a specification. So, while I'm not terribly proud of them here's the examples I have of some game specification:

Two reasonably complete ones from a while ago :-

Retailopia

Battle Scape Armada

And one that I posted recently thats still in progress :-

Into the Expanse

They might not be great but at least they might stir some mental juices.