First Steps

Those first few moments when you start thinking about creating a new game are filled with wondrous possibilities. What is your game going to be about? How are the players are going to interact with each other? What kinds of amazing new mechanics are you going to introduce to the gaming world? The sky’s the limit! It can be a little overwhelming, all these ideas swirling around in your head. Where do you even start?

What you have to do is to just start writing it down. It doesn’t even matter what you write. It could be all of the cool concepts you have, ideas for the art, the different kinds of cards or tokens you’ll need, anything, as long you just start writing it down.

Whatever you write will lead to something else, and that will lead to another thing, and so on and so forth until you have 10 pages of rules for a game that doesn’t exist, and don’t make sense to anyone in the world except for you.

And, that’s OK!

Because that’s how everyone starts, and you need to start somewhere.

But, now that you have this glorious mess, you’ll need to turn it into something that people can actually use. The tendency when designing a new game, especially for people who are doing it for the first time, is to throw every idea, plus the kitchen sink, into their game. While an idea dump is helpful for getting started, it does not actually make for a great end product. Complexity is not your friend here. I’m gonna talk more about this in another post, but essentially, you want to find the cleanest, most streamlined, and easy to understand version of your game that’s hidden underneath of all of the stuff that might be holding it back from being truly great.

But, we’re getting ahead of ourselves.

Just because something sounds good on paper, doesn’t mean it will translate into something that works in real life. The only way to find out if it works if to play test, and in order to do that, you need to make something that people can hold on to. We’re not talk anything fancy here, just some really basic cards that you print out on your home computer, and if necessary, a simple board for people to play on that you made with cardboard and a black marker. 

Of course, the actual items you make will depend entirely on the game you’re trying to make; you might not need cards or a board. The point is, you need to figure out what the bare essentials are for the game you want to make, create those items, and just start playing. This is the only way to find out if those rules you wrote actually make sense, and if they work together.

I wish I had taken pictures, but when I was first starting out, I created cards using actual Magic: The Gathering cards in cheap plastic sleeves, the kind where you get 100 for $1.00, and a piece of paper cut out to the size of the card. I put the text for my game on the paper, and cut out a window, so you could see the picture on the Magic card behind it. It was a pain in the ass, took a long time, and didn’t look all that great, but it gave me and my friends something to work with so I could figure out if this idea that I had was going anywhere.

Don’t stress out too much about making these initial play testing materials look nice, because it’s pretty much a guarantee that you’ll need to change things and you’ll end up throwing it all away after you make a new batch of stuff with your updates. Printer ink is one of the most expensive liquids on the planet. Don’t waste it!

A slightly fancier board than cardboard and black marker. I did end up throwing this board away, BTW.

However, there is something to say about the functionality of what you make for the purposes of play testing. It is much easier to shuffle cards of uniform size made of sturdier material, than it is to shuffle un-sleeved flimsy pieces of unevenly cut paper. And if your play pieces are constantly falling down and you have to stop play to fix everything all the time, this will not only be annoying, but will hinder your ability to find out if your game actually works. Play testing should be fun, not a chore.

Going into this, you have to realize that your initial idea is just that: an idea. More than likely, it won’t have that much resemblance to the final product. You have to start with an idea, play test it, figure out what’s working and what’s not, make adjustments, and play test again. It’s kind of like refining ore to get precious metals. You need to extract the gold from that unassuming piece of rock.

Hopefully, that’s enough to get you started. Good luck, and good gaming! See you nest time.