Have A _plan

When I’m working on a game from the outset, being able to organise my thoughts on it is, uh, well, useful. I mean, c’mon, this seems a bit basic and I’m sorry for laying it out like this, but I find that if I can’t fill out this document, I probably am not ready to make the game*. For that, I use _plans, a naming convention I think I picked up from playing videogames in the 1990s and watching mod .ftps avidly.

Point is, _plans are a useful place to put down your starting ideas for a game when you need something formal you can share. I’m going to go on under the fold.

Here’s an example of how I lay out a _plan for my games:

Game Name

Subtitle

Overview

Pitch the game in as few words as possible

Theme

Important anchoring elements

Components

Rules

Setup

Play

Winning

 

Concerns

Access Concerns

Mechanical Concerns

Art Assets

Let’s break this down, piece by piece:

  • Game Name
  • Overview
    Pitch the game in as few words as possible. This is a bit like your elevator pitch.
  • Theme
    Important anchoring elements. This is when you bring out things like how the game feels, its tone, the word choices you use to describe elements in the game.
  • Components
    This is where I put anatomy outlines for games, which as I refine them get tidied up and turned into a tight list of cards.
  • Rules
    This is a super hard thing to write, and I recommend you first put it as a series of bullet points. Get out the core rules you want – even if you just want things like ‘players resolve this somehow.’ Your rules should be covered underneath these three basic headings:

    • Setup
    • Play
    • Winning
  • Concerns
    And this is where you want to think over the problems in the above sections that came up. Since the plan is still plastic, and the rules are still kinda adjustable, this lets you outline things that you want to deal with, or choices you will make that lets you reduce these concerns. Also, make Access an important thing to think about. The earlier you start working on access, the better.

    • Access Concerns
    • Mechanical Concerns
    • Art Assets

* Lots of my games don’t have these docs, and were instead basically elaborate experiments. But a _plan makes it easier to write the rules later.