If you are game dev and you work with a team (e.g. more than 1 person), like I do, you may find yourself thinking "How do I communicate with my team so everyone knows what (and how) to do?"
I want to focus on the aspect of thinking the levels, puzzles, story, and general gameplay, since this is mostly what we do and mostly what the game is composed of . Well, here is a bit of our process. Maybe you can take some inspiration.
Sketch it out!
One of the main tools we use to help in our thought process is a tiny white board that I have. Even though I am terrible at drawing, it's easier than trying to write words as you think, specially when you're talking of very visual things, like a game. I like to leave the words for when we already have the ideas decided.
So, we grab the white board, and we start talking.
"Oh, I think we should have an inventory that slides from the top of the screen, like this, when your mouse hovers near it"
Then, you draw the inventory (very poorly if your skills are like mine) in the white board, as you explain to the other people around you what your idea was. You can draw lines to demonstrate notion, and even write things to make the meaning of your terrible drawing easier to understand, but most importantly: the white board is very forgiving!
If you make a mistake in your drawing or if you change your mind, you can very easily fix it by simply scrubbing the board with your thumb. Here's an example of an idea I had for the final screens of the game we are making. (check this post out if you want to know what it is about)
You can say it's ugly, but you can't say my wife didn't understand what I meant. As I was drawing I was also telling her the sounds, that I imagined, the pace of the dialogue in the dialogue box, the colors, the transitions... all that with a stupid drawing. But more importantly, I didn't spend time writing long texts to explain my idea, neither spent it drawing detailed sketches. No, simple stuff, done in seconds, that explained the idea, and after she understood it, it was erased from the white board, ready for the next idea.
This part is crucial. Our process is quick, dynamic, and very low effort. That way, we can focus on producing actual content for the game, which is the fun part.
How to document it?
Given the very dynamic and not-detailed nature of our drawings, we need a way to remember and re-visit these ideas, one that gives us enough information on what was decided.
So what do we do? Simple: we take pictures of the drawings! Here are some of them.
I do understand that these don't really contain much of what was "said" at the time, but to be honest, that's more than enough for the starting point of our game, or even further in the future. I'm sure a lot of the ideas will change along the path, even as we develop them (artistic-and-programming-wise). It's good not to have things set in stone because it gives us the freedom to adapt as we progress and see what the challenges actually are.
We'll see how we go. If the need for change appears, we will do so. For now, that's what we got.
Final considerations
I hope you enjoyed reading a bit of how our creative process go. If you're interested in game dev, or in my game, please, follow me as I will post more on how I do things.
I'm new(-ish) in game dev, so I'm figuring things along the way. It will be lovely to have more people contributing with ideas, so feel free to comment yours here. If you want to know more about my game and what kind of things I post about here, just check this post out.
See you next time :)
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