Developer documentation

[Chris Despopoulos]

I'll take a crack at this...

You should try to find developer docs that you can emulate. To start, you need to figure out some particulars of the dev platform -- what language (C/C++, Java, Flash, etc.), what is the dev environment (is there a specific IDE (integrated development environment) you support?), is this an API into a proprietary game engine, or a framework for integrating external technologies like Flash into a TV platform?  Understanding and being able to articulate these issues will help you find examples of docs that approximate your goal.  Don't stick to "Dev docs for TV Games" -- cast a wider net.

You can look at any dev good docs and hope to see the following:
* Overview/description/use cases --  Why even bother with this dev environment
* Architecture -- How is the platform organized, what talks to what, and what components do you program
* Dev tools -- Languages and IDEs supported
* Installation and use -- How to link your technology into a program
* Hello World -- The smallest possible program. This is important because the customer can use it to prove the installation is good
* Sample "recipes" -- Nice to have...  listings of code that performs specific tasks
* Reference -- Each method, function, or whatever types of calls you expose with the signature (what you pass in and what it returns), synopsis, required libs or packages, discussion (only use this method if the moon is full), and maybe sample code

There's stuff to look at.  Look at the MSDN - Microsoft Developer's Network. 

So... is this advice, experience, or sympathy?  Whatever it is, I hope it's useful...

cud