When I started designing games professionally, I didn’t have the technical skills to program my own prototypes so with Pen & Paper I designed my games. It’s still my preferred way for idea generation.
Last week I needed to come up with a lot of ideas, so to the notebook i go.
These flow of ideas will undoubtly make no sense to anyone but me
If you draw, your know that the first few sketches are usually trash. So you get the first few drawings out fast. Then, once warmed up, it gets a lot better.
Same with design: I try to jot down the obvious ideas fast, loosely, and squiggly. But as more interesting designs emerge, I spend more time shaping them on the page.
Some loose ideas around a gameplay-loop is starting to emerge
When working in my notebook, I like to step away from my desk and move between cafés, libraries, and parks. I usually spend about two hours before I get fatigued, then I switch to a new spot.
Sometimes I arrive at a closed café, or the park is too windy.. Time is lost, I have to pack up immediately and move on. But the flip side is the genuine reward of exploration: finding a new, interesting space, which is a great state to be in when coming up with novel ideas.
Some pages just don’t give much, but that’s OK.
I try to savor the pre-production process. So much of game development can be isolating. Head down in production, headphones on, surrounded by screens… maybe for years.
Pen and paper work feels rewarding. Something real is made, a physical piece of evidence of creativity.
A gameplay loop concept is getting more refined
The goal was to fill out 20 pages of design. It was ambitious (since I also had some code refactoring to do) and I ended up completing 15 pages. Still pretty good I think.
Coming into this week I had finished the playable prototype v1 and had come up with a proper fantasy to wrap around the gameplay.
Fifteen pages of scribbling later I have early designs for:
- 3 new game states (with new mechanics)
- Iterations on the mechanics explored in v1.
- A full gameplay loop
The next step is some code-architecture design and then programming.