Should the design document be a continuous line of text, with real sentences, more like a description of the entire game, or should I structure it in simple points? What are the benefits, and are there more ways of structuring it?
Answer
There are no rules or industry standards; structure the document in the way that will be most useful to the people who will consume that document, keeping in mind what the purpose of your document is.
Personally I would expect there to be portions of the document that are better suited to using "real sentences" to convey your idea, as well as portions that are better suited to being written as a bullet-point list of features.
Who is your audience? If it's just you, if this is just supposed to help you focus your thoughts, do whatever works for you. If you are working with others, ask them how they'd prefer to see the document broken down and how they would expect to use it.
I would expect to see a prose description of the salient points of the game: it's main concept, style and feeling. I would then expect to see a section for each major feature of the game.
Do not go overboard with detail and statistics, remember that a design document is typically something that will evolve over the lifetime of the game as you build and iterate. It's impractical to think that you'll write it once, up front, and it will be perfect, so focus on what you need the document to convey now and how you can best convey that to the specific consumers of that document.
It doesn't matter what other people do, you want to do what works best for your team.
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