The Importance of Starting Small

Lesson number one: make it as absolutely small as you can, and then trim off some extra.

I wish I had learned this lesson years ago. I've been modding games and making new ways to play my whole life, and I always dream big. For an aspiring game designer that is a great trait, but one that you must learn to suppress at will. Epic plans for overarching story plots and randomly generated quests for your dungeon crawl game are great things to work towards, but those mean nothing if killing a room full of monsters is boring. So the first thing that you should make for any game is the Minimum Viable Product. Which means pull back on the reins, and build something small.

Part of making a game is playtest. Playing it yourself, getting friends to try it out and give feedback. Without the information you get from testing your game, you can never know how it will actually, on a tabletop with real people, work. All of the theory-crafting and careful planning in the world will amount to naught if you can't see how your mechanics actually play out. This isn't to say you shouldn't plan things out; quite the contrary. But when starting a game design project you need to know as soon as possible what of your core idea holds any weight.

With that in mind, your first step after coming up with a game idea should be to distill it down to the fewest possible rules and variables, and play that tiniest version right away. And I do mean right away - find whatever pieces or dice you need from other games, write some basic notes on a scrap piece of paper, and get at least a few plays in by the end of your next weekend. When you have a game to start playing, you find out what's good and bad, and then you can build from there. So even if your first test build sucks, is boring, or even is unplayable, you now can move forward and start actually making a game.

This is the biggest reason that your local gaming group has so many aspiring designers who have never finished or published a game. Without the crucial step of actually starting to work on a game, people naturally get caught up in per-production, making endless notes sketches for a game that they've never really taken the plunge on. Think of making a minimum viable product as a way of overcoming designer's block.

One other big advantage of starting off your design process as simple as possible is this: you can add as many variables as you want after, and do it one at a time. If my core mechanic for playing cards, trading resources,or resolving conflict is solid but a tad boring on its own, I can layer on however much depth I want. But if you start off with tons of rules and your game by some chance plays mostly okay, identifying whatever variable is throwing gameplay off becomes more difficult by degrees.

But enough on the theory for now. Next post I'll be going over an example of a minimum viable product for a dungeon crawl board game, as well as how we plan to use it and how it's growing.

Welcome to the Random Number Generation.
-M