I’ve seen too many people quit game design, and I won’t stand by it any longer! There are many reasons new game designers quit within their first few months, but I see one common problem crop up more than any other: people keep trying to build their dream game as soon as they start. If you truly want to have your best shot at entering game design, you’ll want to establish one critical skill first.

Game sketching

Artists have sketchbooks. Mucisians have jam sessions. But I’ve seen many game designers - especially board game designers - leap straight into their best shot at a commercial game, instead of practicing fundamental design concepts.

To put that into perspective, that’d be like trying to learn guitar by renting a recording studio. Not only are you much too green to be reaching that far, but you’re also immediately leaping into ‘presentation mode’ instead of ‘growth mode’.

You must experiment in order to improve. Experimentation necessarily involves making shoddy work, things that you hadn’t thought about doing before. Conversely, whenever you go into presentation mode, the mode where you’re expressing something for others, that’s when you pick the best options from a pool of things you already reliably know. But if you haven’t experimented enough, the pool of ‘what you know’ is much smaller. The quality of your work will be capped by how much experimentation and practice you’ve done.

If you want to be a game designer, then like any other form of art, you’ll want to spend as much time as possible trying out design itself. Rushing to build a full game is a really easy way to get overwhelmed while also wasting a lot of time.

This isn’t just a tip saying you should make small games when you first start - though that’s a fine tip as well. It’s actually saying you should go even smaller:

You can just design a talent tree.
You can just make a bunch of weapon stats.
You can just sketch out a crafting system.

It’s just like the way artists sketch out hands, or musicians practice with different instruments and tempos. If you want to focus on just riffing on a few ways a game could scare the player, do that! Let yourself design things that’ll never end up in a game, just to see how it would end up working. Do you love Star Realms? Try designing a new faction! Try designing a few new cycle of bases!

How to sketch

A game sketch can come in many forms, as varied as games themselves, but generally it’s along the lines of drawing / plotting / writing out game components, rules or mechanics.

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.

And indeed, you certainly never have to make a full game, either. It’s a fulfilling hobby to just sketch out smaller systems and be satisfied.

But should you want to build a full game one day, your sketches will also function as a toolbox that will help you quickly solve problems, create solutions, and design creative and fun mechanics for your games.

The more game sketching you do - playing with smaller mechanics without constructing a full game for it - the more you’ll build up that valuable design instinct to keep you agile and creative. Keep at it consistently, and you’ll establish an ever-growing foundation for fulfilling and productive creation.

Extra Guidance

If you’d like some inspiration for sketching, you can check out some general tips on these choice youtube channels.

You could also reverse-engineer games you know to better understand its working parts
(See: Mindtrap and Slay the Spire).

You could sketch out solutions or small systems based on discoveries like this.

Once you’re ready to actually start your first game, you can get a boost by learning the stuff we wish we had known before our own first game.

Want to share your own game design journey, or see what we’re up to at Cloudfall? Join our community Discord for a chill time.

Stay lofty!

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