Starting Somewhere

It’s been just under two months or so since the release of Camp Keepalive: Endless Summer (which you can certainly go and grab at this very moment). While the first few weeks were spent in the usual whirl of bug fixes and marketing attempts, once things calmed down it was time to start looking forward to what was next.

Picking a new idea to work on - something that could consume the next six months or year or even more of my time - can be a daunting proposition. Experience has taught me I simply can’t go with whatever idea happens to excite me at the moment. What might seem like a great seed of an idea may not have the potential to grow into a truly great game. Beyond that, even if it excites me, will it excite anybody else? If I’m not bringing something new to the table with whatever it is I’m doing, will anyone be interested in it?

These are hard things to think about. They are the kind of thing that can throw you into analysis paralysis and have you second guessing every choice you’re making. I know, because that’s where I was for a few weeks.

The Two Ps

Fortunately, experience has also helped me make things a little easier on myself. There’s a concept in writing - a way of thinking about what kind of writer you are - called Pantser or Plotter. Plotters, as you might guess from the name, are people who think through every step of a story before they even put down the first word. They can tell you exactly how the story is going to go, beat for beat, start to finish. A Pantster, on the other hand, just sits down and starts writing. Maybe they’ve got the basic concept of a setting or character, but they just let everything flow from there. They might not know how the book ends until they get there, and it’ll be as much a surprise to them as it is to the reader.

Obviously these are the extreme ends of the spectrum, but it helps to think where you fall in between them. When I first started writing, I was a solid Plotter. I would do outlines, I would do character bios, I would draw maps and write entire histories of areas that might only be mentioned once. This wasn’t a bad thing, necessarily, but it made me inflexible. If I started writing and the plot felt like it demanded something that wasn’t in my plan, I would get into debates with myself about whether it meant the whole thing was wrong. All in all, a frustrating experience.

Over time, I learned to loosen up. While I didn’t become a true pantster, I definitely shifted to somewhere in between (a plantster, so they say). I could take my ideas, let the writing flow, and see how things naturally grew from there. If I wanted to connect A and B, it was ok if going to C and D along the way felt right.

Throwing the Design Doc Out the Window

When it came to game design, I definitely came to it with my Plotter instincts in the beginning. When I first sat down to work on a game, I always started with a design document. It would have everything the game was going to be, down to the tiniest details. How mechanics would work, story details, level designs - it all had to be there in black and white before I would even think about beginning.

This might work for some people (and if it does, please don’t consider this a critique), but it was not working for me. First of all, spending that much time designing the final version of things before you’ve even prototyped the core idea is a recipe for time wasted. “No plan survives first contact with the enemy”, and no design document survives first contact with actually being played. I would frustrate myself, I would feel like I was wasting time, and making things was taking far longer than they should and with worse results.

Here again, time and experience have taught me to loosen up. Here, even more than in my writing, I’ve become a pantster. Taking an idea and building as rapid a prototype as I can to see how the idea feels. Maybe it's a paper prototype, maybe it's in Unity. The point is just to have something. If the prototype, at the most basic level, doesn’t feel fun or promising, I know I need to rethink things. Sure, maybe this is more effort up front actually building things, but I think the time saved not sinking weeks or months into a bad idea is far more valuable.

This is all a very long-winded way of saying I’ve spent the last month working through a variety of ideas to see what feels good. What feels fun. It’s been quite a little adventure (yes, still with some frustrations), but it’s helped me think in some different ways and try some very new things. Some of them turned out promising, some of them clearly needed to go back to the drawing board. But in the end, I achieved exactly what I was hoping to and found the idea that felt right.

So, next week we’ll start to dive into that idea that started here:

And where it’s going from there (super exciting pic, I know)

Next time: From paper to prototype!