Technical spec

Hey guys, does anyone have any experiance in writing a technical spec that I can give to a programmer and he/she can make the system I am after? and if so, can anyone suggest any techniques/websites i can look at to write one?

I just can't get my head around just writing out what he user will experiance.

Pardon?

Basically all you have to do is explain to the programmer what you want the game to be and how it will look, thats it really.

Just tell them the graphics have to look like x the system has to run like the game y and the system has to fit on z.

From my experiance you would be writing the Functional Spec and the programmer would write the Tech spec.

A functional document is a detailed description of what the system should do and the Tech is how it does this.

There are many ways to write these types of documents but the most important aspect of them is that they are clear and easy to understand. Each company I've worked at has different methodologies of writing Tech and Func specs that suite their particular I.T environment.

Start off with a brief description of what you want the program to do. Then you break down the functionality within the program into smaller parts or objects and describe each one.

For example, if you wanted to make a clone of space invaders and would describe such things as:

Space ship:
move left and right using the Z and X keys.
Ship always points in Y diretion up the screen
Space fires a missle.
Missle always goes up the screen in Y direction

Alien:
Move randomly about on screen
Travel down from top of screen

And so on... You need to obviously put alot more detail in it though.

You could also try out a couple of the UML methods such as Use Cases and Activity Diagrams to help the programmer understand what you want. They also help you better understand how your program will work and what holes may appear later on.

Hope this helps in some way

In my real job I write alot functional requirement specs for developers. Each and every requirement ( however small / depending on the dev ) has to be listed separately with information regarding it's priority, it's ref no etc... Be very explicit when you describe each requirement and detail any general assumptions made at the outset of the document. Nothing should be open to interpretation.

Realistically you should have a number of iterations of the functional spec, walkthroughs with devs etc.. before work even begins on the TRS.

Why don't you just ask the guy if he has a requirements template that he would prefer you used?