Want to be a game designer? Get in the habit of sketching

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.

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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!

5 Things I Wish I Knew Before Designing My First Board Game

Captain’s Gambit has been one of the most rewarding projects I’ve ever worked on. Watching it grow from a humble class assignment into a full retail release has been an incredible journey. That’s not to say that the journey has been easy, far from it. I made a ton of mistakes along the way, and I learned a lot from each of those failures. Some of the things I learned are pretty specific to social deception games, like how to design asymmetrical characters. Some lessons are a bit broader, like how to run a Kickstarter campaign. Hell, some lessons I’m still learning right now, like how to manage a growing community.

But this week, I wanted to take a step back and speak directly to my past self. See, when I decided to create a board game, I had no idea what it was going to be like. I didn’t know how much it was going to cost, how long it was going to take, and how much work it was going to be. I didn’t know which parts were going to be hard, and which parts were going to be surprisingly easy. I just didn’t know what to expect.

So today, I’m going to share some tips I wish I had when I was starting out. Keep in mind that your experience likely won’t be quite identical to mine, so not every tip is going to be perfect for you. But if you are thinking at all about making your own board game, hopefully my insight can help you on your journey.

#1 - Remember Your Goals

There are a lot of reasons why you might want to make a board game. Maybe you felt inspired after learning about game design. Maybe you’re looking for an outlet to better express yourself. Or maybe you’re thinking about turning tabletop gaming into your full-time career. Whatever your goals are, it’s important to keep them in mind so that you can know what “success” means to you.

Do you care how long it takes to finish your game? Do you care how much it’s going to cost? Are you making the game just for you or your friends, or are you hoping for a full retail release? Is this the only game you want to make, or are you planning on making more? There aren’t “right” answers to these questions, just the answers that are right for you. Always keep your goals in mind and use them to make sure you’re making progress.

#2 - It’s Okay to Let Things Go

At some point during development, there’s going to be a mechanic that just doesn’t work. Maybe it doesn’t feel fun, or maybe it’s too complicated, or maybe it just straight up ruins your game’s balance. Whatever the issue is, you’ll try over and over again to fix it. But despite iteration after iteration, you just won’t be able to get it right.

When this happens, it’s often best to just let it go. If something about your game isn’t working, you shouldn’t have to force it. Instead, shelve the mechanic for now and see if you can make the game work without it. In the worst case scenario, you can always bring it back if you can’t find something better. But most of the time you’re going to find that there are plenty of new and better mechanics just waiting to take its place.

#3 - It’s Worth Spending Extra for Good Art

If you’re working on a relatively small budget, you might think that art is expensive. And to be fair, it definitely can be. But I want to assure you that paying for good art is 100% worth it. Your game might be super fun to play, but people won’t want to play it if it doesn’t look good. Obviously it’s important to stay within your budget, so I’m not suggesting you break the bank. But it is definitely worth hiring the best artist that you can afford. Good art can’t save a bad game, but it will elevate a good game into an amazing one.

#4 - Playtesting Is Going to Take Longer Than You Think

There’s going to come a point where you think your game is almost finished. You’ll think that it’s fun, that it’s balanced, and that everything is easy to understand. You’ll decide to run one last playtest just to be safe, but you’ll think it isn’t necessary. But I promise you, in that “last” playtest, you’ll find something game-breaking that will make you think your game is terrible.

This is normal, and this is okay.

Playtesting takes a really really long time. Not only does each test take a while to organize, facilitate, and analyze, but you also need to run A LOT of them (for context, we facilitated literally hundreds of playtests while working on Captain’s Gambit). On top of that, your game will always benefit from more playtesting. Playtests are one of the best ways to identify problems with your game, and you’ll never stop finding problems. Obviously if you find something game-breaking, you need to fix it (and then do more tests to make sure it’s really fixed). But if playtests are always going to find issues, how do you know when you’re done? Well…

#5 - Your Game Will Never Feel Done

Your game will never be perfect. No game is ever perfect. There will always be things that could be improved, and there will always be things you wished you did better. Each time you iterate on your game, you’ll get it one step closer to perfection. And because you’re making progress, it’s easy to trick yourself into thinking that one day it will be perfect. But honestly, it’s never going to be perfect. And that’s okay.

Your game will never be done. But one day, you’ll be done with your game.

At some point you’re going to look at your game and think “Yeah, this is good enough. I’m happy with how it is.” Once you hit that point, it’s okay to stop. Hopefully you get to hit that point on your own terms, but sometimes life will make you stop before you think you’re done. If that ever happens, just remember that even though your game could be better doesn’t mean you shouldn’t be proud of what you created.

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What other tips do you have for people making their first board game? Share them in the comments below. And if you’re making a board game right now, come share your journey with us on our Discord.

Stay Lofty!