My Design Process

I was asked yesterday if I could write about my design process, and I thought it was a cool idea! I don't know how useful or even entertaining this post will be for most of you, but here it is anyway. A disclaimer: everything I know about designing games I've learned via trial and error, and from paying attention to what others do. I know I should read some proper design theory and study about it, but I haven't done anything beyond reading some blog posts and checking books like "Tome of Adventure Design". What I write here is what works for me, and it can be optimized in a million different ways, I'm sure. It's definitely a work in progress thing, and I tend to decide things on the fly. So far it's worked, somehow.

Everything starts with an idea, what I call "the obsession". I often get ideas about this or that potential game ("what if I write a game about the Ruso-Japanese war, but with fantasy?", "or what about a game about being the leader of an evil cult"), but generally speaking I just write them down and continue working on whatever I'm working at the moment. But sometimes there's an idea I really can't get out of my head, and those are the ones that I just have to pursue because it becomes a literal obsession: I go to bed thinking about it, spend half the night writing notes in bed, then wake up running to my PC to clean up my notes. The most recent example of this is the game I'm currently working on: Salvage & Sorcery (yes, for those of you who don't know, I'm working on a new game. It's a smaller project, what I'm calling my "summer vacation game").

Once I've decided I'm going to work on a game, I double down on my note-taking. I open a document and start creating the different sections for my notes; this is usually:

• A Lore section

• A Characters section

• A Mechanics section

• A Gameplay section

• A Gear & Loot section

• An Enemies section

With these created, I start just adding my different ideas to each corresponding section, trying to establish some order so it's easier for me to find in the future. Once I have a skeleton of what I want to do, I generally write the small intro chapter that all my games have. This helps me establish the lore and the overall direction for the game. It helps make the game real, not just a bunch of notes in a Google document.

By that point, I'm completely invested in the game, and I know that it's going to happen (despite me usually resisting it, since I have so many ongoing projects already). Which generally means I start thinking about titles. Since all my games stem from a cool lore point of view (I love mechanics, as you all know, but I generally want to write a game because of a cool setting idea I had), by that time I already have quite a lot of the core lore established, and I start brainstorming ideas for titles. Sometimes I come up with a cool idea very quickly, others I end up with a lot of options and I even create polls here on Patreon to help me decide. That's the second thing that really crystalizes a game for me, though: coming up with a cool name brings the game closer to reality. In a way, it's like that old notion of how knowing the true name of a thing gives you power over it: once I know the name of one of my games, it cannot escape.

The third and last thing I do to really materialize a game is start looking for artists, especially one for the cover. And then, as soon as i find one, I immediately commission a cover. 90% of the times I have a cover ready to go before I've written not even half of a game. Having the cover really makes the whole thing much more real in my mind, and it gives me a visual representation of what I'm going for. Just so you get an idea of how important this is for me, I can tell you that right now I have the covers ready for three projects I have only written a few lines about.

With all that out of the way, it's time for me to start actually writing. At this point in my career as a game designer (feels so weird to write these words, still), I know quite well the structure of my games, so I go to the corresponding game folder in my Google Drive, and start creating the different chapter documents: Intro, character creation, core rules, gameplay, and so on. And then it's just a matter of filling in the blanks! I always start at character creation, because my games are always heavy on the amount of details a character has, and it helps me establish a lot of the core mechanics. I always have the core gameplay mechanic already defined in my notes, though: I can't start writing a game if I don't have that set in place. It's worth saying that by this point, my notes file is generally about twenty pages long, with lots of already detailed sections that I generally just copy/paste to the actual game chapters. It's a real mess, a mix of properly written rules with single line notes making obscure references to books or TV shows. But since it's only for my own use, it works for me.

The last part of designing a game is the playtesting. I generally do this while I start working on the layout, and it always results in having to make several passes and changes to all aspects of the game, some of them simpler, other much more comprehensive. For example, Ruthless Heavens, Boundless Fate initially had all Skills work with a Cooldown system. But after playtesting and player feedback, I realized that it was a PITA having to track so many different cooldowns, so I changed it. It was a substantial change that took me days, but it was worth it!

And that's about it, really! It mostly takes a strong obsessive mind to get me started, and then once the original impulse dies off and I'm in the middle of writing the boring bits, it's thanks to the wonderful sunken cost fallacy that I end up finishing most of my games. Sure, I always think what I'm working on is going to be awesome (even though there's always a moment or two of self doubt, as with any other artistic process), but it's A LOT of work to get a game finished, especially a solo game. There are tons and tons of details to take into account, and if I didn't have people expecting me to finish the stuff I work on, half of the time I would just give up. So believe me, I really understand all you people who have half finished projects, it's hard to get that last push in and wrap it up.

So what do you think? I'm open to suggestions about how to streamline my process, let me know if you have any, or any questions if you want more details about a specific step.