Game Design Diary July 2018

Way back, near lost in the mists of time, I started toying around with game design. It was fun! I had a reasonable design or two. I started thinking about publishing and realised, if I wanted to self publish, then I needed an audience and that is where this blog came into being. Growing this promptly took over and while I don’t regret the work I’ve put in on it, I wanted to make some changes and do more design again. This post is a discussion of what I’ve been doing over the last couple of months and some of the lessons I’ve learnt.

In November last year I realised that if I didn’t start designing soon I might never get anywhere. I was imminently turning 28 and due to get married (which has now happened!) which meant the prospect of having kids was suddenly all the more realistic and I didn’t want to get to that point without at least giving myself the chance to try this first. There was never going to be an easier time.

So I had a week of holiday going spare and determined to get on with a design I’d been interested in exploring at that time. It was a pretty good week! I pulled together a prototype. I playtested it a couple of times and then I needed to rework a new version and… I just didn’t! When it came to making design work in my normal life I just didn’t have a plan and so I fell back into old habits.

Over the last few months, especially the last month, I’ve tried to do things differently. To find a way of fitting design into my daily lifestyle so that I can make consistent progress. I’m not quite at the daily stage (yet) but I’m certainly at the weekly/regular stage. And better yet, I feel very motivated to continue. Here are some of the things that have worked well for me.

Setting 13 Week Goals

I could write a whole post on this, but briefly, something my wife and I started doing in April was setting 13 Week (quarterly) goals. We completed the first quarter last month, and are now 5 weeks into our 2nd quarter. The power of both setting sensible goals and focussing on this time period should not be underestimated. 13 weeks is long enough to achieve something substantial, while short enough to feel close and push you towards achieving it. Having 4 such blocks in a year satisfies the neatness geek in me.

Due to wedding organising and other factors, my goal for last quarter was smaller than it otherwise could have been: to research and build a prototype game and take it along to a playtest meetup. By July, my new game, Wren’s Churches, was built and had been taken along to two playtest sessions. A success!

This quarter (July to September) my goal is bigger, and far more about the process of designing than the actual games themselves. My goal is to spend at least 7-10 hours a week on design. Now, that doesn’t mean I’ve failed if in week 2 I only manage 3 hours of design; this is about building a habit. Really I want to be designing regularly, I want to know if I enjoy designing regularly, and by the end of September I want to be able to say yes or no to the question “do I want to continue designing games?” The 7-10 hours figure is to put a specific benchmark in place that I can compare my progress to on a regular basis.

Reflection

What I’ve found very useful in life in general over the last 4 months is regularly reflecting on what I’m doing, how I’m doing it, and how I’m progressing towards my goals. I spend an hour each Sunday free writing about my week and reviewing my progress, and planning what I might want to do better in the next week. I do a bit of daily reflection each evening on what my wins and lessons from the day were. Writing this is certainly a valuable piece of self-reflection on a larger scale! I wholeheartedly recommend this technique for anyone working towards anything in their life. For my game design goal, having this raw number of hours worked tracked gives me a first metric for evaluating my progress. The specifics of the work done and how that has been applied to particular designs is the next level of reflection and analysis.

Finding Time

It would be unreasonable to assume one could leap into doing 7 extra hours of work a week without thinking about where it is going to come from. For me, the obvious place was the blog (as I mentioned in my anniversary post). I had a good start here thanks to the latest video series providing 6 weeks of pre-created content. I’ve got a reasonable backlog of posts built up, and am writing a series of reviews of the Arkham Horror mythos packs which are proving much faster to put together than others. If I need to, I will reduce output on the blog.

Becoming a Better Designer

It’s all well and good saying I’m going to be working 7-10 hours a week. What am I going to be working on? To answer this I thought about some of the core elements of game design, and identified what things would be most valuable to me to work on, in terms of skills. Here are the things I came up with: They were:

• Continual iteration
• Solo playtesting
• Portfolio of designs (not exactly a skill)
• Rapid prototyping

These are the things I was planning on focussing on for this 13 week period. There are almost certainly more skills to think about (drop a comment at the end with other useful designer skills!) but these were ones I knew I needed to work on. Let’s look at how I’m doing with them.

Continual Iteration

My November game was never iterated on. My top priority this quarter is to ensure I kept working on one design over multiple weeks. Ideally, the entire quarter. Since its creation, Wren’s Churches has had 6 (non-solo) playtests and been tweaked and changed between each. One change involved building a whole new prototype. This process has been helped considerably by being a small (52 card + odd bits) game.

Lesson: a small game is much easier to work on!

What has driven me to do regular work here was deciding from the start to attend my local designer meetup each evening that I was available. Since that meet up is every two weeks, I have a tight but manageable deadline to think about and implement changes in the design.

Lesson: set a date for regular playtesting and stick to it

Solo Playtesting

You can only get so far with one playtest a fortnight and I don’t want to waste it on completely terrible ideas. So solo testing it is. I’ve always struggled with solo testing, but at least for Wren’s Churches, I’ve found just letting my “opponents” make some decisions randomly has been sufficient to explore the decisions available to a player and whether those seem interesting or not. I’ve also found that simply having the components out and moving things around has been extremely useful for coming up with new ideas to try out.

Lesson: just moving some components about is great for ideas

I’ve still got a way to go with really being comfortable with solo playtesting and figuring out how to really make the most of it but I’ve had a good start.

Building a Portfolio

I want to have more than one design to work on so that I can switch to something else if one game hits a roadblock. I also like the idea of having a mix of options for playtest meet ups so I can productively use different numbers of players and different lengths of time. Wren’s Churches takes about half an hour which is a great length and size for making quick changes. It gives me something I can easily work on while larger designs are put together.

To aid this, I made a list of all the design ideas for game design that had been bouncing around my head or jotted down in various places. These were just one or two sentence summaries of the idea. The concept. Then I can go through these and take my pick of the one I think would be most interesting to work on next. It was a very productive exercise! A little too productive maybe: when am I ever going to be able to work on all these!?

This month I have also done some tweaking to a much older design to give me a second option at playtests. This one (the Emperor’s New Clothes) involves a fair bit of hidden information so is difficult to solo test. It’s about the same size in terms of components as Wren’s Churches. I’ve also been working on a slightly more component heavy 2 player game whose prototype is coming together.

Rapid Prototyping

A big part of both creating new designs and iterating existing designs is prototyping. Turning ideas into something physical that can be tested. I have always been slow at doing this. It took me a whole quarter to pull together the design for Wren’s Churches! Getting faster at doing this is a big part of this quarter’s work.

Why did that first prototype take so long? Well, firstly, I wasn’t pushing too hard. I had 3 months and several other obligations so, of course, it took me all 3 months. More importantly, my concept for that game was: Wren built 52 churches in London after the great fire, make a game about that with 52 cards. That’s pretty broad. I needed to take that and come up with all the mechanics from scratch.

I then spent a considerable amount of time researching all the churches to help generate ideas. Reading about 52 churches takes quite a while, especially when you’re looking for more interesting stories than the dimensions and type of stone! This was valuable, but with hindsight I spent a bit too much time looking for details than getting on with trying out game mechanics. As I understand myself, I’m probably always going to lean more towards planning and ‘theory-crafting’ than just throwing pieces together… although, as I said earlier, I have found moving pieces around on a table very useful indeed! So maybe I do have it in myself to be more spontaneous. We’ll find out in the next few months!

Lesson: research is good, to a degree

In that vein, my work on the latest prototype, has been progressing much faster. The concept came to me around the start of the month, I did some introductory research over a couple of lunch breaks (it’s another historically grounded game) and started figuring out some ideas for mechanics. Work really started in earnest at the beginning of last week when I confirmed a friend was able to visit at the weekend. I spent that week working hard on mechanics and, for a couple of hours Thursday evening, sat with a deck of blank cards and Wikipedia writing down ideas for actions and event cards based on the historical events. In the end there wasn’t quite time to completely finish the game before the weekend but I did manage to make substantial progress.

Lesson: you don’t need to have everything straight in your mind to make a prototype

All my prototypes so far have been black pen on blank cards (cheap off eBay!) which is all I feel like I need at the moment. But, especially with those whose core components are stabilising, I will want to figure out some digital prototyping systems. I’m not willing to invest in InDesign yet though, so will need to source some free systems with data merge capabilities.

Plans for the next month

I believe there is only one designer playtest I can make this month, which is unfortunate but I’ll have to make the most of the time I have. Here are the plans as they stand!

• Finish latest prototype so it can be played without making stuff up on the fly. Preferably in time for said designer meetup.
• Start playtesting Wren’s Churches at home with my wife – I’ve been waiting until I felt like I had something functional since while she is willing to help, I didn’t want to waste her support on something that wasn’t working. Similarly, I might be reaching the point where I can start inflicting – I mean – introducing this to friends. Will see if there is an appropriate moment this month.
• Prototyping a larger game – I’ve got some ideas for more substantial Euro style games and want to start moving on to building those.
• Investigating digital prototyping – figure out some work flows for digital prototyping, rule books and version control. I’ve already got some things written into Google docs and sheets, so need to get from there to a printed prototype. It would be good to get this set up now, before I desperately need it!

Another busy month planned, but I’m looking forward to it! If you’ve enjoyed this insight into my processes, let me know and I’ll consider doing some more! Also, let me know if you have any questions!