Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - #469: Starting a Design

Episode Date: September 8, 2017

I'm often asked questions about how best to start a design. In this podcast, I go into detail about how to do just that.

I'm pulling out of my driveway. We all know what that means. It's time for another drive to work. Okay, so today is a gamery topic. People ask me all the time, people are designing their own games, they ask me questions. And so one of the things I like to do in this podcast is kind of help out game designers. So I want to talk about how to start a design today. It's one of the hardest parts. I mean, there's many hard parts, I guess, to design, but I want to sort of walk through exactly when you're beginning, what do you need to do? What are the keys to success? Because the keys to success in a design start right away and have a lot to do with the decisions you make very early on. So today's podcast is about those decisions. It's about how

you start a design. Okay, so first and foremost, I like to say, start with a golden idea. And what I mean by that is, usually when you start design, you want to have some really strong idea. You want to have, it's not that it needs to be fleshed out. It's not that you need to have all the answers to it, but you need to have something that sort of just says, okay, I sense potential in this idea. So for today, I'm going to talk about a bunch of different designs I did for magic. I'm even going to talk about a few designs that aren't magic, to sort of talk about how, when you start. So for example, let's take some sets. I'll take a couple sets that obviously turned out really well. So Ravnica.

My golden idea when I began Ravnica was I wanted to make a multicolor block that was about two color play in which all the pairs were equal. That's not how we had treated two colors at the time. For Innishrod, it was, I wanted to do a top-down design that captured the flavor of the genre of horror. For Zendikar, I started with the idea that there were all these land mechanics that we had never really done, that we could group and block around making land the central point.

Go to something like Kaladesh. I really started from the idea of inventor world. That you are an inventor. Amonkhet was the idea of a top-down on how do we criss-cross Egypt with Bolas. Each of these cases, when I started my

design, let's talk mood swings. I'm going to talk mood swings today. That's a game that I've worked on forever. I don't talk a lot about mood swings, but I'll talk about it. So when I started mood swings, I was trying to make a mass market trading card game. I was trying to figure out how do I bring a trading card game to a larger group of people? And that was where I started. I really started with the idea of I wanted to make something that was a simpler trading card game. And Magic, well, I love Magic. Simple it is not.

And so what got me to make Mood Swings was starting from the premise of, okay, what if I made every decision I could make to make a robust, fun trading card game, but that was as simple as a trading card game could be? The goal there was, it was a trading card game. I wasn't trying to not make a trading card game but that was as simple as a trading card game could be. The goal there was, it was a trading card game. I wasn't trying to not make a trading card game. I was trying to make a trading card game, but I wanted to make one that was approachable by so many more people because it was so much simpler.

That's where Mootswing started. Okay, so you start with your golden idea. Why do you need a golden idea? Why do you need something? Because if you don't, making a game is really hard. Designing a game is super hard. And that you need to start with a little bit of magic. You need to start with something that shows potential, that shows greatness.

Because you are going to get lost along the way. You are going to have problems. And that you, it is so hard to make a great game that, what I'm trying to say is, before that you, it is so hard to make a great game that, what I'm trying to say is, before you begin, look, start with a little bit of magic. Start with something that really excites you. Start with something that is, that has potential in it. Because when you're making your game, along the way, there's a lot of concessions you make, there's a lot of decisions you have to do, there's a lot that comes along and that if you want to make something truly great,

you kind of have to start with something in mind. Now note, it could change. I'm not saying that the thing you make, you know, the thing that even that you start with, your golden idea, I'm not saying that can't ever change. In fact, a lot of what I'll be talking about today is how to maximize allowing yourself the chance to change. But you need to start from a place of passion, from excitement. You need to start from something that you truly believe is a great idea. And that I always sort of say to people that no one sits down to write a book and goes, hmm, I don't know what my book's going to be about.

No, no, no. They sit down to write a book and go, I got a great idea. Now, in the end, maybe that's not where the book ends up. That's not, you know, but you want to start with a great idea. And that if you don't have a great idea, if you don't have something that sings to you, you're probably not ready yet to start making it. That's why I say start with a golden idea.

That you want to really have something you are passionate about and excited about and will drive you. Because a lot of game design, there's a lot of slogging through things of trying to make stuff work. And that you need to have a focus. You need to have something that's driving you, that excites you. And so I want you to start with something amazing. And if you don't have something amazing, you're not ready to start yet. That's my thing. Keep thinking of amazing things. And once again, it needs to be something that excites you. It doesn't need to be something that necessarily you could sell today. You know, a lot of people are like, oh, I need a hook.

That can come. You do need a hook. I mean, as I talked about, 10 things every game needs. In the end, once the game is done, you have to sell the game. But when you're first making the game, that's not something to concern yourself with right away necessarily. Make something awesome. Make something exciting. Make something that makes you, the game player, excited by the game. Okay, so once you have this golden idea, and then once again, the golden idea doesn't have

to be super thought out. It just has to be, here's something that really speaks to me, that's exciting, that I think will make a game that is special and unique. Okay, so the first thing you do, you have your golden idea, you have to sort of draw a focus. You have to say, okay, I'm making this game, what do I need to do? So the first thing I say is understand your focus you have a golden idea understand your focus so Ravnica, I'm like, okay

what is my focus, where am I starting okay, I'm starting my set's going to be about two-color play let's start there you know, Innistrad, my set's about top-down gothic horror, let's start there Zendikar's about land mechanics, let's start there Zendikikar or the Kaladesh is about feeling like an inventor. Let's start there. Amonkhet is about finding the cross-section between Egypt and Bolas. Let's start there. Then in each of these

cases, I figure out what my first focus is. Where am I starting? That day one, I want to, day one, when I sit down, now given I'm designing with a team, you might be designing solo, maybe you have a team, but for me, day one is I have to sit down in front of other people because I work in a team, and I have to sell them on my vision. I have to sell them on my golden idea. And part of that is focusing. It's creating a focus of where you want to start. Because one of the biggest problems I find when people start designs is if they're all

over the place, you need to sort of know where you want to begin and know what you want to begin with. And for me, for Magic for example, that's always like, we have to design cards. At the end of the very first meeting, I need to send my designers away with a homework assignment. We are going to design a thing, extra thing, why? And so what I want to do is I want to know what that focal point is. I want to walk out of the meeting saying, okay, here's what we're going to do. So a perfect example is something like Innistrad. Like, okay, I said to my team, I want you to design top-down horror.

Anything you want. So, okay, so here's the first thing. Have a focal point. Understand what you want. Okay? And what I will say is you usually want to begin where there's a pinch point. you usually want to begin where there's a pinch point. So what I mean by that is, anywhere in design, there are areas in which, like, when you design something, you are going to start by one section and then fill in the rest.

And that what you don't want to do is make the area that is the tightest of design space be something you do late, especially if it's the key to what's going on. So, for example, top-down design. I use the industry as my example, but it's true for any of my top-down design. Really exciting top-down design where you see the card and go, oh, it's this. Those are hard to come by. It is not easy to make exciting, endearing, cool, top-down design.

And so I tend to start there. When I'm doing a top-down design, I start in that space. I start by saying, okay, I want you with no restrictions. I'll give you no restrictions. Excite me. That what you want to do when you start your project is you want to figure out where knowing your focus where is the most exciting place that you know is going to be one of the most restrictive places you want to start kind of where it's most important and most restrictive so for example let's say i'm doing a multi-color set doing ravnica for example, let's say I'm doing a multicolor set, doing Ravnica, for example. Well, two-color design is harder than monocolor design by a lot.

You know, if I'm doing three-color design, I start a three-color design. That you want to start where your focus is that meets up with where there's the most limited design space. Because what you want to do in general is you want to start designing in the place where you'll be the most restrictive. Because you want to give yourself the most freedom in that place. Now, and also a very common thing I do when I'm starting a set is I want to give my team, and this is true for yourself, whether it's a team or just by yourself, I want to give myself and my team a lot of freedom to mess around in the area that I know my golden idea sits in.

That if I'm trying to make, if my golden idea for Innistrad is I'm going to do a top-down set all about the genre of horror, then I want to make sure it shines. I want to make sure that I'm hitting it. So the first thing I did in my team is I didn't say, go design thing X. I did not start by saying, hey, design vampires. It's not what I did. What I said is, in fact, the very first meeting is I did a brainstorm session in Innistrad. I did a brainstorm session. I said, okay, let's write down everything we can think of when we think of horror, of the genre of horror. And monsters and vampires and werewolves

and zombies and ghosts. And we wrote all this stuff down and darkness and, you know, creepiness and music. And we wrote everything down that we could think of, of the horror genre. And from books, from TV, from movies, everything we thought of, we wrote it all down, a giant thing. And then I said to them, any of this, and not just this, if you come up with something else.

But I'm like, I want you to design cool, rich, top-down stuff, because I knew that was hard. With Ravnica, for example, we started by trying to figure out, okay, what kind of designs can we do with multicolor designs? With CalEdge, I'm like, what does it mean to be an inventor? With Zendikar, I'm like, okay, what can you do with land? What mechanical space? And we mapped out all the mechanical space. We mapped out all the different possibilities.

So in each case, or let's take mood swings, for example. Okay, with mood swings, I knew the hardest part about mood swings was making something that was simple and so I tried by saying what is the simplest thing I can make and when I started mood swings the very first thing I started was how do you know what to do on turn one because I have to you have to do something what What's the goal? What's the goal of the game? I wanted the simplest game. And so I said, okay, I'm going to make a rule for myself because I want the simplest game possible. And so the rule for myself is,

I play a card, you play a card. I said, okay, I want it to be simply simple. That on a turn, I only do one thing, you only do one thing. Because if I do nothing, well, nothing happens. But if I had played more than one card, well, that's not the simplest way it can be. And then I said, okay, assuming I play one card and you play one card, how do we figure out what happened? How do we know? And I said, okay, well, what if the goal of the game is I'm

trying to get a higher score than you? I play a card that has a score on it. You play a card that has a score on it. And I'm like, okay, well then there's a very simple goal. The simple goal is I'm going to play something. You're going to play something and we'll see. That's where I started. It was a very, I wanted to start from the simplest of goals. And I think when I started, I started the very, very, very early mood swings, I even started with, this can be played on turn one. This can't be played until turn one. This can't be played until turn two. I was messing around with the idea of,

well, how do I do a mana system that's super simple? What if I just tell you when you play the card? I later learned that was too restrictive, that any card should be played at any time. But I started someplace of trying, of walking down that path. Of saying, okay, I'm trying to make the simplest trading card game possible. What do I need to eliminate?

What do I need to get rid of? And my golden idea, by the way, for those that, I haven't talked a lot about mood swings. My golden idea for mood swings was, I wanted the simplest game possible and one of my big ideas was no deck building. Was you literally have a deck

that one person brings, you shuffle, you both play off the same deck and that you don't even need two people to bring a deck because that, that my friends, makes it more difficult.

What if I only need one person to have a deck? That's one of my ideas I started with with Moon Swing. Anyway, okay, so what you want to do, get your focal point. You have a golden idea. Get your focal point.

Then start from an area that is key to your focus, that's key to your theme, but that's the most restrictive to let people work on that. Okay? And then the thing I do is I always start by saying to my team, do whatever you want. And the reason I do that is I want to see where the idea goes. I don't want to steer the idea in a direction. I don't want to, like, for example, with Innistrad, I knew that a lot of the success or failure of it was going to revolve around werewolves.

Why did I know that? failure of it was going to revolve around werewolves. Why did I know that? Because I knew that when I looked at all the things that were really indicative of the horror genre, I knew that we had done a lot of it. That magic, the overlap between magic's fantasy world and the world of horror, the genre, we had overlapped a lot of that. We'd made a lot of vampires. We'd made a lot of zombies. We'd made a lot of ghosts.

You know, we had creepy humans. We had done a lot of it. It wasn't like we were going in the space that we had never explored before. Magic actually explored it quite a bit. But in the history of magic at the time, we had made three werewolves. So I knew it was something that was endemic to what we were doing that we really hadn't cracked yet, that we had never made an awesome werewolf. And I knew looking at all the spaces that we'd

be exploring, I knew that was a space that we would have to really, we'd have to shell, that we'd have to nail, that like if we were going to do something cool, we had a, there had to be something new and innovative we hadn't done before, and werewolves was the loudest thing. I mean, we'd made three of them, but we really, really hadn't done them. We hadn't made a successful one yet. But I did not start by saying to my team,

it's all about werewolves, design new werewolves. I eventually got there. What I wanted to do first was, I wanted to see where people went naturally. And this is even if you're doing your own design. Don't get too restrictive early on. Start with, I mean, start with your theme, start in the area of the greatest restriction, but be broad. And just design things. Just make things. Because what happens is when you make stuff, you'll just make little tidbits that shine.

And that part of what you're trying to do in any design is you are trying to find the magic, I like to say. That you're trying to, you have your golden idea. You want to bring that to life. idea, you want to bring that to life. And that what will happen is, at some point in design, you'll make something that is a pure representation of what you want. And then when I do that, I'll call it lock-in. It means I find something, I go, wow, that really sings. That really is, it meets, it matches my golden idea. It matches my focus. It matches my theme. It's me doing something that really makes this thing shine. For a magic expansion, usually it's a card that like wouldn't just go in another set. That it would define this set. So for example,

Theros, we were making, we were doing top-down Greek mythology, and we stumbled upon Chain to the Rocks, which was an enchantment that you, it was basically like a pacifism, but I could only use it if my opponent had a mountain, or if there was a mountain in play. I guess I could have the mountain. And it was this weird, quirky, flavorful thing that i i couldn't i would never ever made that anywhere else but it just was dripping with flavor and it kind of had the sense that i wanted um a little later we made a card called journey to the underworld where you sacrifice a creature

and the end of turn you get another creature from your graveyard and you bring them both back. Which, we had never made a card like that. And it told a story and a Greek mythological story to boot. Like it, those were the two cards that really early on that I find that what you tend to do is you find something to your game that speaks to

you. That sort of says, oh, this is what I want. You find things that kind of are we'll, this is what I want. You find things that kind of are, we'll call it the home run. You find executions of the golden idea. And that once you find one of those, you nurse that baby. You protect it. And not only that, you then use that as kind of a guidepost of where to go. I tend to do this early on design, is I'll have my team design something, I'll find something awesome that somebody does, and then I'll say, okay, this, this, this thing,

there's magic here. How do we repeat that? And the other thing that I tend to do is, as you start to find these idealized versions of your golden idea, you then start sort of locking them in and saying, okay, I like this. Now, when I say lock it in, that doesn't mean later you can't realize that for some reason it's not quite what you're doing. Locking it in doesn't mean you can't ever unlock it. But what it means is you start to get some direction. Because part of what you want to do when you're making a game is,

like the biggest problem I find when you make a game is you get lost. That you don't know what, like you start with an idea, you start with a direction, you start with a focus, and at some point you can lose that focus. And that, the, I talk about this in other regards, but the number one role of leading a design is making sure that your team knows the direction it's looking in, that you want to set your bullseye.

And that bullseye can change, but you want to make sure that you and your team knows where you're going and that the way you get lost is you get down deep and that you... So, for example, I use a metaphor here. I used to go boogie boarding. So boogie boarding, for those that don, you, so for example, um, I use a metaphor here. I used to go boogie boarding. So boogie boarding, for those that don't know, is you, you take a, uh, a flotation, kind of like a giant kickboard, if you will. Um, it's made out of foam. It floats obviously. Um,

and you go out in the waves and the idea is kind of like surfing, except you're never standing on it. You're lying on it. And I used to go, there's a place I used to go that had crazy big waves. Bigger than I should have been in. Like they were, oftentimes the average waves of that beach would be five to seven feet. They were crazy big waves. There's a section down in LA that I five to seven feet. They were crazy big waves. There's a section down in L.A. that I found that had crazy big waves. It's where professional boogie boarders would go. Why I was there in retrospect, I have no idea.

I was young. I was foolish. But anyway, so one of the things with a boogie board is there's a strap. And you put the strap on your... Did you put it on your ankle or your wrist? I think you put it on your wrist for boogie boarding. You put it on your ankle for surfing. I think you put it on your wrist for boogie boarding. I haven't done this in a while.

But anyway, so when I first saw the strap, I thought the strap was so you wouldn't lose your boogie board. Like, oh, well, you know, it's rough wave. You don you wouldn't lose your boogie board. Like, oh, well, you know, it's rough wave. You don't want to lose your boogie board. And, well, that is true. It's a secondary thing. You do want it. The most important point of the strap is not to lose a boogie board. Oh, that is an important part. But not the most important. The most important is often when you are boogie boarding, and I'm true to a surfing too, but I boogie boarded, you will get tossed underwater by the waves.

And when a wave, especially a five-foot wave or seven-foot wave, tosses you underground, it pushes you underwater, and they do what they call the washing machine. It twirls you all around. You have no sense of perspective. So one of the problems is you're now underwater and the very first thing that happens when you get pushed underwater is you're like, ah, I can't breathe. I'm underwater. You know what? I need to go find air. I should get out from underwater. But the

tricky thing is when you're boogie boarding and you get washing machine, you don't know which way up is. You are so disoriented that you don't know which way air is. And being that you don't have a lot of time until you can get to air, knowing which way air is is really important. So now we get to the super important part of your strap, which is your strap to your board. Well, your board floats. Your board is above water

because it floats on top of the water. Even when you go underneath it goes back up almost immediately. So the reason you have a strap on your wrist is it tells you where up is. And that is really important when you are under the water and disoriented. And because for those that have never been hit by a wave, water is a powerful source and it is, it will knock the air out of you. So you're not underwater, you might have lost the air that was in your lungs to begin with because you get smacked by a wave and you have very limited time to go get some air.

So you really, really need to know where the air is and that lifeline tells you where the air is. Now the reason I use this metaphor is I find in design that you get washing machined a lot, that a lot of times you get thrown off, that you get disoriented and you don't know which way that the end state is. Where am I going? You get lost in the direction you're heading. And the reason that I think having these sort of inspirations, the reason they're so important is they help direct you. They help guide you.

They help make you remember where you're going. And that what I want is, early in design, is I want my team to start finding some of these inspirations because the more inspirations I lock in, the more examples I give of what we're doing, the more I'm trying to sample the essence of what I want to be, the more my whole team gets on the same page. Now, eventually what happens is, oh, and another thing that happens, by the way, for you, the designer, the guy in charge, it is easier to understand when you've made a singular thing.

Like when I've made a magic card that sings when I've made a magic card that sings, when I've made a magic card that really is doing something cool, it's easier in a vacuum to recognize a cool card. That a cool theme, I mean, you try to recognize your cool theme, and you have guts on it, but it's hard, it is so much easier to see the execution of a small thing and go, that is the right execution, than see the execution of a big

thing. And so one of the reasons that this gives you guidance that helps find the direction that leads you toward error, if you will, is that it's much easier to go, I believe in this card. Like when we made Chain to the Rocks, I knew we'd made something special. And I knew we'd made something that sort of said, okay, I want more things like this. How do I get more things like this? Same with Rescue from the Underworld.

That it did something cool and important and they wanted to find more like that. So for example, early on for Innistrad is we made some cool, flavorful cards. Um, you know, we made, like we made Wooden Stake very early on. And the idea that this was a card that helped you when you fought anybody, because it's a poison, poison, it's a sharp stick, but wow, it's really good against vampires. And that's when I started to say, oh, oh, I kind of want to call out some monsters by name. I kind of want to make

a silver weapon that's good against werewolves. I kind of want to make the garlic and the steak against vampires. That it made me realize that, oh, I, I need to call out the monsters. I need to say this is good against the vampire. And what that told me is, oh, I'm going to have to do some monster tribal because if I'm going to care about it, I'm going to have to talk about it. And if I talk about it, that means, and, and making, making the, um, wooden stake made me realize I needed vampire tribal, which led me down the path of making, of having tribal be a big component of Innistrad. Um, that, you know, a lot of, uh, for example, Ravnica, I knew I wanted two colors. I knew I wanted all ten color

pairs to be of equal weight. And it was, as I started making cards that did that, and started talking with Brady Donovan, who had the creative team at the time, that me being exact in what I wanted, and getting examples of what I wanted was able to give Brady enough guidance to come up with the idea of the guilds. Like, okay, if you mechanically want this, here's what we're going to do. And that in each case, each thing we did, when you find that golden moment, when you find those things that really solidify, they start to give you guidance of where you're going. Now, okay, once you start to find one or two of these,

then use that, start triangulating where you're trying to go. Start using the things you know. Because what happens is, when you start, you don't know a lot. When you start, you say, okay, I'm going to have a theme. I have a golden idea. That's going to be my guiding light. That golden idea is going to get me to an implementation that works. Not an ideal, but an actual, I've done something.

There's some component to my game that works. So, for example, early on when messing around with mood swings, I realized that I wanted you to play any card at any time. And I was not sure exactly of how to do that. And so I said, okay, well, what's the simplest possible goal I can give you? I play a card, you play a card. I have a score, you have a score. Okay, well, what if the person with the highest score wins the turn?

You just win. Instantaneously, something happens. And then that got me to realize that what's my win condition? I didn't know my win condition was. So my win condition was just win three turns. Like, how simpler is that? Every turn you do something, somebody wins. Win three turns, you win.

And all of a sudden, like, okay, now I have a game that can't go beyond five turns. Okay, I have a five-turn game. One of my goals had been to be simple. Well, to be simple, I realized I wanted to be fast. That part of simplifying things, I realized was, if the game doesn't last long, it can't get that complicated. That one of the ways to keep it simple

is make it short and quick. And so one of the things Mootswings, I figured out very early on was, I'm going to have a very short game time. That you play a card, I play a card, you play a card, somebody wins. We do that until someone wins three times, which is no more than five turns and as little as three turns. And that really breathed life and made me start to understand what I was trying to do. And once I knew that it was about the score,

I said, well, I play a score, you play a score. Well, let me figure out why there's a scoring. Like once I had that base, once I understood that it was about the score, then I started having the first part of my mechanics, which is why the score is going to vary is going to depend on what the card does. The more powerful the card, the lower the score. The weaker the card, the higher the score.

And then what I realized was I figured out that there was a baseline and that, you know, the average card costs a certain amount and the cards that are good cost less and cards that are weaker or have additional cost in them cost more. That's where I started. And in each case, you know, or like for Cowardash, for example, I wanted to be an inventor.

And I realized very early on that I needed to... Being an inventor means you needed to stick things together. And that made me come up with energy. Now, that was a mechanic I made years before. But when I was thinking about what I wanted, when I was thinking about how to capture my golden idea, that came up really quick. I was like, a resource? I have to make use of resource

and use that resource to create something? That felt super inventory to me. And I'm like, okay, okay, well, let's start there. Let's see if we can make this work. And I had my team work with inventing stuff. Now, it just so happens, I do exploratory design. So some of my design starts earlier than some of your design might start because I, in the nature of how I work, I actually do preliminary work. But once I started seeing that, I figured out, like once I started seeing energy and figured out, that's when I started realizing that part of being an inventor was that you got to build things. That there was a variance. And that's what got me to the idea of there was a high variance in the game. That I had the same deck of cards. That this was an environment where with the same deck of cards, the gameplay would be different each time at a higher percentage than normal.

Because it was the combinations that mattered. It was how things worked together that mattered. Part of being an inventor was you invented things. Well, how do you invent things? Well, you combine things or use resources or you get to mix and match things in a way that is different each time, that each time I'm inventing. When I was trying to understand Amonkhet, a lot of that was saying,

okay, what is Egypt and brainstorming everything that is Egypt? What is Bolas and brainstorming everything that is Bolas? And understanding where did Egypt lie and where did Bolas lie. And a lot of the early idea was that we wanted to start in which we lean toward Egypt and end where we lean toward Bolas. But all of that was dependent upon figuring out this middle ground of where they overlapped. So, start with your golden idea, get your focus focus be open-ended in your focus you and or your team

design toward the tightest pinch point the thing that is the most about what your set's about that has the least you know has the most restrictions to it build there find something that represents the end state of something you want with magic I'm talking about cards that's the nature of a trading card game.

With whatever you're doing, find something in which some component speaks to you. Some component sings. Some component says, oh wow, yes, yes, yes, this is a component I want. So for example, I made a game before I came to Wizard called Time Duel.

Where the idea was, it was a game in which each person had a little time machine and you were fighting each other, jumping through time. And my golden idea was exactly that. I wanted you to fight using a time machine as a weapon. That was my golden idea. But part of me saying is, well, what does that mean? What does that mean you have a time machine? And then I came up with the idea of

a timeline that you fought within the timeline. And the way it worked was you went 0 to 5 and 0 to negative 5. Could have just been 1 to 10, I guess. But I like the idea that negative 5 implied the past and 5 implied the future. And then I started realizing, like, once I realized there was a timeline, once I got that, I started building around to say, oh, well, what does that mean? Since I'm in a locked amount of time, you know, that means, like, oh, if I do something at this increment and something happens two turns later, I know when something happens. And I made it coagulity that had time built into it. You know, and that's how I got that fact.

You know, that different things that you work on will start getting you down the path. But the key is, and this is the most important thing, is that when you design you want to push toward the direction you have and then find the concrete thing that sort of speaks to you.

And then you build around the concrete thing. You build that, you lock in things that really shine, that really sing, and that you then start chaining those things together. And what you have to ask yourself is, I like this component. In order for this component to be part of the game, what does that tell me about my game?

Now that I have a concrete, smaller element, I can work backwards from that element. You know, I have made a, um, I have made a wooden stake. Well, that wooden stake better be good against vampires. Oh, well, it's gotta be good against vampires. I have to call vampires out. Oh, well, if I'm calling vampires out, dot, dot, dot, you know. And that is where you start to create something awesome is because you find the things that speak to you and then you sort of figure out where they need to be to work. And I know sometimes when I explain this to people, they feel like, shouldn't it be more progressive?

Is it weird that you're making a small thing to back figure out the big thing? My answer is no, because the key is a lot of the way that you will find things and figure things out is you want to get things that excite you and you need to bubble down to concrete sometimes to understand that things are working. Now, I'm not saying there's never people that sort of don't go from the outer circle and work their way in, but what I'm finding is it is very hard to know when I don't have a concrete thing whether something is working. So working with concrete things and finding the concrete things will be very valuable. Now, be aware that doesn't mean that as you find more concrete things, that that one concrete thing, if it ends up being an outlier, maybe in the end it doesn't work.

Maybe you found something you love, but doesn't actually match your game. I'm not saying that the things you lock in can't ever be unlocked. But what I'm saying is, they will help propel you forward. And the key for early game design is that you want to know where error is. You want to know what way is up. And that you want to constantly be doing things that give you direction to keep you moving forward. And that, my friends, is how you begin the game design.

But now I am at work, so we all know what that means. It means it's the end of my drive to work. So instead of talking magic, it's time for me to be making magic. I'll see you guys next time.