Maximize Game Design Time, Part 2

Here’s the second part of how to really take advantage of your game design time! If you missed part 1, you can read it here: http://www.weirdgiraffegames.com/carla/wordpress/2020/04/16/maximizing-your-game-design-time-part-1/

Working with Others:

• If you’re working with other people, work on tasks to help them out first. If you can get them what they need, they can be working at the same time you are and you’ll get way more progress done. You never want to be the bottle neck to the project!
• Make sure to check in regularly with the people you’re working with. I try to talk to everyone either every few days or every week, whichever is more appropriate. This will make them know that the project is important to you AND you can make sure everyone is on the same page. There’s been so many times where I checked in with someone that I thought had all the information they needed and they actually didn’t but they didn’t want to bother me to find out. Doing regular checkins where you ask if the people you’re working with need anything makes it easy for them to tell you how they can work faster.
• Figure out how to work well with people! Each person is different to work with, so be up front and honest with them and be willing to try different things. It’s going to take time and effort to figure out the best ways to communicate, but once you figure it out, it’ll definitely pay off.
• One very important thing when working with others is to try not to get overly emotional! This is really hard sometimes! It takes a lot of getting used to to go from working alone and making all the decisions to having to incorporate someone else’s opinions and ideas into the project. Just remember that everyone in the project wants it to work out well, so keep that in mind and don’t let emotions get in the way of making something great.
• If you get to the point where you think that not everyone wants the project to work out well, make sure to communicate clearly about what is happening. Also keep in mind that you’re important! If it’s stressing you out or demotiving you to work with a certain person, it’s up to you to end the partnership. Not everyone works well together and that’s just because we’re all human, we’re at different points in our lives, and we want to get different things out of game design. Always be super respectful, as you never know what will happen in the future and if you’ll want to work with that person again.
• Another reason I like slack; if I do get emotional, I can just walk away from the computer and answer later. That’s much harder to do if you’re in a video chat.

App Recommendations for Working with Others

• I highly recommend using slack to keep ideas flowing. You can share images, links, files. The free plan lets you view the 10 thousand most recent messages, which is actually a lot, especially if you have different slack instances for different collaborations.
• One thing I really like about slack is the ability to make a lot of different channels. This isolates conversations and keeps people focused. In particular, I use one channel just for things that need to get done right now; when someone completes the task, they add an emoji to it, but they can also respond to only that message with details or questions.
• Dropbox Paper is also really nice for getting ideas out there and being able to collaborate with others. I love using Paper so I never lose an idea and you can have your notifications set to email you whenever anyone else has edited a file you’ve shared with them. You can also edit the file at the same time as another person, so you don’t have to worry about overwriting anyone’s ideas.
• There’s also Evernote, Google Drive, and a few others. Be willing to try new things and see what works for you and your group! There’s no one answer on what works and what doesn’t for each different collaboration.

Making Time for Game Design

• You can wake up early or stay up late. Use your lunches, if you have them. Make every moment count.
• I really like waking up early in the morning to work on things, as once I’m awake, there’s not a lot of other things I can do and I don’t have the typical distractions of the day. It’s also easier to work on things in the morning, as you’re not tired out from everything that’s happened during the day.
• As for lunches, I like using those to either have a break from my day job by doing the miscellaneous things I need to get done, like sending out emails, catching up on social media, or other random tasks, as I only have an hour to spend. Another good use of lunch is playtesting or just playing games! Everyone has to eat, but you can take that time to also play a game and get feedback or just try out a new game.
• Never feel bad about playing other games, as you do need to play games that aren’t yours. You can’t only play other games as you do have to work on your own games, but I’ve gotten a ton of ideas just by playing games on what I do like or what I don’t. It also gets your brain working differently and can give it some time to figure out things. If you’re constantly working, your brain will never have the downtime to figure things out!
• Make sure not to get overworked, take breaks when you need to. You can’t do heavy tasks all the time. Taking a break could mean doing a no brain task, like cutting out a prototype or sorting cubes into different colors. I try to always have some sort of organization task ready for those days where I’ve used all my mental power, but I still want to push some productivity through.
• Don’t feel bad if you’re too tired to even do any easy task. Know that taking a day off means that you’re a lot more likely to get something done tomorrow.

Focus on the Positives:

• I’ve talked a little bit about this throughout this two posts, but I want to really emphasize focusing on the positives and making sure that you’re taking care of yourself.
• Game design is one of those things where a lot of people do it in their spare time and it takes months to see any significant progress. You can get so invested in your games that you won’t be able to see how much they’ve changed since you’ve started working on them.
• If you’ve made the lists of everything you do in your game design sessions, you’ll have that to see the changes.
• I also tend to keep a lot of the different iterations of a game, until I know I won’t need it anymore. It’s rather empowering to see a giant stack of cards that are all in the past now. Sure, they’re rather useless at this point, but they can remind you that you’ve iterated a lot. Plus, if you need to revisit an idea, you’ll still have the previous cards there waiting.
• It’s been really exciting going through and seeing all the changes that I’ve made to certain games. I tend to forget all the minor changes that come together to really make a game significantly different.
• Some people will look at a pile of old cards and see failure; they’ll see all the things that they did wrong, the poor wordings, the numbers that weren’t balanced. You really don’t want to have that mindset, as it’s rather depressing and won’t motivate you to make things better. Instead, think of all the things you’ve learned and done. Even if you try something and it doesn’t work out at all, you now know more than you did before and you’re better off than when you started.
• It also helps you remember that you did all the work. I know it’s hard for me to remember all the changes that my games have gone through, but I have all the files on dropbox.

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