For example, you might design a few cards for a card game, or you might design a new player faction.
You might get into level design, or even draft up a concept map for how you could make players feel scared. You might even start by making some custom rules for King’s Cup. Game sketching is about seeing how you can add or change rules in a game and consciously playing with mechanics to see what happens.
In other words, if you want to improve, plugging away at a single project will be inefficient, and often, a source of despair that my deter you from game design entirely.
Instead of working on one game, try your hand at focused learning with a specific rule system, mechanic, or game element of any kind. Draft multiple approaches you could take to design (or redesign) any component in a game. The goal is to improve yourself, rather than make the best thing possible.
Why are game sketches useful?
Whether you’re drafting up vehicle prototypes, detailing a boss battle without a game, or seeing how many dice you can roll at the same time, spending time with partial game elements will give you a chance to experiment with the whole spectrum of game design skills - instead of forcing you to focus on one specific genre and one subgenre of designs. For example, you might think you can only create social deception games, but with enough sketching you can develop your weaker areas enough that any genre of game will feel comfortable and creative to play with.
In other words, sketching out partial systems ensures a balanced growth in your skills. It’s also the fastest way to improve your skills just in general, since you get to focus entirely on making smaller elements of a game work instead of trying to reckon an entire sytsem at once. Sketching out game designs can allow you to build up years worth of experience over the course of months - saving you immeasurable amounts of time and letting you build a well-rounded portfolio of design skills.