Working on the method

Hello everyone, today we will let game design theory rest a bit to talk about being more productive as a game designer. I have always been a procrastinator, so I’m interested in any possible help I can get to become more productive. Often I get hung up on the results of my efforts or I think obsessively about working and learning to improve faster in my job. This year I decided to take a step back and look at my life, to concentrate on the method. The reason is simple: two people can dedicate the same amount of hours and effort to something but have very different results based on many factors. Some would say that the most important factor is talent but I would argue that method is the most important thing. Improving the method means asking questions such as: am I intentional and mindful in my practice? Am I working toward my goal? Can I change the way I do this thing? Can I be more efficient? Can I accomplish more in a day?

I can cook hundreds of meals a year, I won’t become a great chef and there is no guarantee I can even become good at all. For every thing you do, you have to analyze the whole process, judge the results and adjust the process accordingly. So this brings us to the whole point of this blog: how can I stop sucking at making games? Surely the answer is “design a lot of games”. But it’s also “improve your method”. By this I don't simply mean your game design method, but also how you organize your life as a game designer. In countless hours of game design podcasts, I noticed how the most important quality of each game designer is their ability to understand themselves in every aspect, from skills to motivation to time management. This year I learned many lessons about these things that I will now share with you. Many of these things apply especially to what I do on my own outside my game design course, where I can only count on myself and I have to accomplish a lot of things in the little time I have.

Plan, plan, plan

The first thing to do if you want to improve your methods is planning. As I said, it’s important to be mindful and intentional about the things you do. And what can help you more than planning? Establishing that you wanna do something and then later checking if you actually did it and how, can be of tremendous help when it comes to intentional practice. Plan the day and hour when you’re finally gonna watch that game design video, plan that these week you will develop a prototype in Unreal all by yourself, plan that you will pay attention in your project to the first time user experience. Write down what you plan to do and establish a deadline, where you will review how it turned out and what can you improve next time.

The secret to motivation

There are countless gurus on the web that talk about motivating yourself, but this year I discovered that there is no secret to motivation and the reason is simple: it’s hard to motivate yourself. Humans are lazy, procrastinators, always looking for easy gratifications. We are surrounded by sources of dopamine and apps designed by people whose entire job is to make them as addictive as possible. It’s simple to just stay on your bed, wasting time on social media while “accepting” the fact that you suck and you just aren’t motivated enough to get things done. In a way, being sad and beating yourself up can be a form of procrastination, in which you give up on improving yourself. Hence, the idea shouldn't be “find the motivation, wake up at 4:00 a.m. and take a cold shower”. You should discover/come up with little tricks that work for you and implement them in your daily routine, tricks that take advantage of the way your brain functions instead of trying to swim upstream. Some turn off their phones, some need to organize with friends, some use the pomodoro technique. Probably none of these will suffice alone, but you will need to find a good combination of all of these depending on the task at hand. That said, I find that there is a method that I found very useful recently: the tiny habits method by BJ Fogg. I’m not sponsored by the author or anything, I just find that it has been life changing for me. The idea is simple:

• Find where you wanna get better/get something done

• Identify all the smaller tasks/activities that could help you

• Tie them to an activity that’s already in your routine

After a while, you will begin to automatically execute the task without even thinking about it or having to force yourself. For example, I wanted to get better at playing piano but I thought I didn't have the time. I started looking at my routine and I decided that in the morning, while sipping my tea, I would have played piano. It was strange in the beginning, but after some days, the thought of playing piano started popping into my head automatically during breakfast. It is suggested that the task can start after a specific moment (after brewing the tea) to create the connection in your brain between the two things. It is much more difficult to create the connection before a moment, for example before going to bed. On the other hand, if there is something you always do before going to bed (ex. taking medication), you can start the task after that. Not every task can be placed in every moment of your routine. You will have to study your daily activities to find the right place for everything.

For game design, I wanted to find the time to work on my board games as you have to work on them for a good amount of time. I then got the idea to work on board games during my morning and afternoon snack. I would go to the kitchen, grab something to eat, put a timer (remember: pomodoro technique) and start working on them for the timer duration. In a time interval this short, it was very important to already know what I wanted to work on, I didn’t wanna waste any time figuring out what to do. So I always have a list of some things I wanna accomplish in my next 2-3 snacks (see the importance of planning). At the end of a session I will then update my list according to my results.  Of course I also needed to devote longer sessions to board games, but this method kept me motivated, as I was sure to always accomplish something at the end of the day, avoiding the sad procrastination cycle (and dissatisfaction in general). 

Break Down

Finally I wanna conclude with something a bit more about game design. To be more intentional in your game design, it’s important to understand all the elements in your game and the impact your decisions can have. In games, things are often interconnected and every change can compromise the structure, but… the structure is never good to begin with and changes need to be done at every step of your process. Often game design can feel like walking in a minefield, where every step leads to a different kind of catastrophe. And it’s true, every change you make will bring other problems, this is why it’s so important to figure out the ramifications of your design decisions to understand which are more affordable, useful or dangerous. 

There are many methods to break down a game into its elements, like dividing it into dynamics and their relative mechanics (see the MDA framework) and I am currently experimenting on a method that is connected to music composition, but I will talk about it at another time. The right way to decompose something will depend on what you’re working on and what are the problems you are facing. Still, the takeaway is to always zoom out and look at the big picture (i.e. how are all these elements connected to the rest?) and write down your analysis before acting.

A fun habit

That’s all the time I have for today. Hope you can implement some of these suggestions, see you next week, thanks to this wonderful new habit I have of publishing an article every tuesday :)