Think Like A Game Designer - Think Like a Game Designer: Level Up!

Episode Date: May 9, 2022

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Hello and welcome to Think Like a Game Designer. I'm your host, Justin Gary. In this podcast, I'll be having conversations with brilliant game designers from across the industry, with a goal of finding universal principles that anyone can apply in their creative life. You could find episodes and more at think like a game designer.com. Today's episode is a little bit different. Instead of spending a long time talking to another designer or brilliant person in the industry, I'm just going to give a short little set of tips from my own experience. In this case, highlighting the principles behind the level up journal. This is a journal that I designed to help make myself more productive,

and I've created a version that I can share with you so that you can apply these exact same principles. The goal of these short-form podcasts is just give you a few quick tidbits, a few quick lessons that you can apply in your day-to-day life. And if it's something you like, I'll make more of them. But in the meantime, you'll be able to listen to this episode. And if you're excited about the level-up journal, you can pick one up for yourself at the levelupjournal.com.

and if you apply the code podcast, you'll get a 10% off discount at checkout. My whole life, I've been obsessed with figuring things out. Games provided a great avenue for me, as games represent concrete systems with understandable rules and incentives. I enjoyed breaking games down into their constituent parts and seeing how I could manipulate those parts to achieve my objectives. Life, however, is much harder to manipulate than a game. The goals are fuzzy. For example, what counts as a good job, a successful relationship, or a happy life. The path is unclear and often unrewarding. Which diet should I adopt? Is my writing getting better? Is my relationship not going well because of my partner or myself?

I created the level up journal to help make winning at life more like winning at a game. I've been using it myself for the last five years, and in that time, I launched dozens of games, wrote a book, launched a podcast, got engaged, launched an online course, and ran both a podcast. publishing and a consulting company, and for the last year, I've been doing that while traveling the world as a digital nomad. I created the level-up journal for the same reason I wrote, think like a game designer, and started this podcast, because these lessons took me a long time to learn, and I wanted to share them in a way that makes your path easier than mine. I want to talk about the journal, but also some of the fundamental principles behind it, so that whether or not you think the journal is right for you, you can still benefit from some of the lessons.

Lesson 1. The Power of Focus. Many people are used to to keeping all their notes, action items, and to-does on their phone or some other digital device. And to be clear, so do I. Digital devices are great for communicating with others and for having a place to store and organize the hundreds or thousands of important pieces of information that we need to handle in our day-to-day lives. But the power of these devices comes at a cost. That cost is distraction.

How many times you have this experience? You need to look up just one quick piece of information. So you pick up your phone, but then you see a text from a friend and respond or a notification about a new update to a project you're following or an email that came in that you can just give a quick response to or maybe you accidentally click on a social media feed or a news site and there goes the next 20 plus minutes of your life. Our devices are designed and optimized to capture your attention and that is a huge problem. What you want to do is control your focus and accomplish things that actually make your life better. I created the level up journal as a pocket-sized paper

journal to help avoid this distraction. You are forced to focus every day on just your three most important tasks and your three most important habits. There's a small section to take notes and a simple minute or less gratitude practice and that's it. Focus is a superpower in modern society and even though we need our devices and connectivity, having tools that let you disconnect and create habits of focus is critical. The level up journal makes it fun and automatic to have this focus. Even if you don't have the journal, you can do the same thing with an index card. In fact, that's what I did for years before I designed the journal. write down your major points of focus and carry it with you or leave it on your desk in a visible

place. Start working on your most important task and don't let yourself get distracted until it's done. Once that task is completed, cross it off, take a short break if needed, and then start on the next one. A common challenge is that we have tasks that can't readily count as done in one day's work. For example, creating rules for a new game, writing a book, or preparing a pitch proposal may all take multiple days of work. This is where focus blocks come into play. Each task in the Level Up Journal has a small shield icon where you can write the amount of time you want to commit to the project. Focus blocks give you small ways to get wins

and get the checkbox for getting started. Simply set a specific amount of time that you want to work on a project and if you succeed at working on that project for that amount of time, you get the satisfaction of checking it off. The key to a good focus block is blocking all distractions. Put your phone on silent and if necessary, users tool such as freedom or rescue time or just disconnect from the internet entirely if your work doesn't require using the internet. Work on your most important goal first thing in the morning.

The longer the day goes on, the more likely you are to be distracted by other people's priorities or various distractions and fires that show up throughout a day. For power users, block off 30-minute chunks and try to do this at least four times a day. If you're a new user, just practice with five-minute chunks. Even just focusing on one task for five minutes can have a huge impact because getting started is the hardest part. Once you get past that mental block and start momentum, very often you'll be able to continue much easier and make a lot of progress with very little effort. We all have infinite things to do and pay attention to, and that is never going to change. But if you can dial in this one habit of focus, I promise you it will transform your life. Lesson number two, make the grind.

fun. I'm going to be honest with you. Accomplishing anything meaningful is going to take a lot of hard work. The path to success is often fuzzy, and sometimes you have to take two steps backwards before you take three steps forward. Finding a way to keep yourself motivated throughout this process is critical, or all the tips of tricks in the world won't help you. If you think about grinding levels in a game like World of Warcraft, you realize you have to do a lot of small repetitive things over and over and over again to be able to level up and get what you want. Life is the same way. The reason that World of Warcraft is fun and, say, getting in shape is not, is because wow rewards you along the way and you can see steady progress every day. This is why the Level Up

Habit Journal introduces gamified rewards to give yourself a lot of wins along the path to success. Every day you get to check off boxes and have the satisfaction of seeing things done as you earn experience. Every week, you can look back on your accomplishments and see if you leveled up. And at carefully planned intervals, you are able to give yourself. level up rewards that motivate you to keep going. Whether you use the journal or not, find ways to give yourself rewards for behavior you want to encourage. A checklist and celebration of accomplishments is a great start. Here's another example from my own life. I had a rough time waking up early in the morning, so I had enough time to meditate,

exercise, and complete my most important task before my workday started. So, I decided to start my morning routine with something I enjoyed, a cup of coffee and 10 minutes of reading a book. If I sleep in, I have to skip it. Because I want the reward of my enjoyable routine, I now look forward to getting up early to be able to start my day. I also started small. My initial goal was to wake up 20 minutes earlier than usual, 10 minutes to read and enjoy myself, and 10 minutes to meditate.

Only after that process was easy and automatic, and I had been doing it for over a month that I slowly add in more time until now I've got a full 60-minute morning routine that I love. Find as many ways as possible. to make your habits and goals satisfying. Making the grind fund will help you get past the inevitable ups and downs on your path to success. Lesson number three, the rule of three. You may wonder why I picked just three goals and habits to focus on every day within the journal.

To help explain that, I want to introduce the principle of the rule of three. I was first introduced to this concept by Chris Bailey in his book, The Productivity Project, and it has changed my business and my life over many years. years as I have unpacked its implications. Our brains like to think in sets of three. There's three musketeers, three stooges, and three little pigs. Stories come in three-act structures, and even divine forces can be broken down into a holy trinity. This works in part because our brains are essentially pattern-making machines, and three is the smallest unit that allows us to find patterns. The level-up journal leans into this principle, but I apply it in a scaling way to everything I do.

The journal has space for three goals and three habits every day. It forces you to pick the most important things to get done. It also asks you to pick your three most important goals for each week. I do the exact same thing for my monthly goals, my quarterly goals, and my annual goals. Now, of course, as you scale up, you increase the scope of what your three areas of focus might be. So, for example, my three daily goals might be, finish recording my podcast episode, design a new scenario, for Ascension Tactics, email our distribution partners on SoulForge Fusion scheduling. And my weekly goals might be publish the next episode of my podcast.

Get Ascension Tactics contents defined for quoting by our product team. And prep all materials and schedules demos for SoulForge Fusion to retailers. My annual goals would be even bigger. For example, launch the Ascension Tactics 2 Kickstarter. Or complete the SoulForge Fusion Global launch. For Think Like a Game Designer, I had annual goals of running a master class. and continuing the monthly podcasts and bi-weekly emails to my list. You could see how each level feeds into the other

and scales up to accomplish some pretty incredible things over the course of a year. I do the exact same thing with my company. Everyone posts our three daily top goals in Slack. Our weekly meeting sets those three goals for each of the divisions, and we have team gatherings every quarter where we set our top core priorities. We have a distributed team of people all over the world, and this system helps us to focus and be pretty.

no matter where we are or what times we're in or where we're working. Hopefully you found some of these tips helpful. If you think that the Level Up Habit Journal might be for you, you can order one at thelevelupjournal.com. For podcast listeners, I'll also have a special 10% discount code if you enter podcast when you apply at checkout. This has really been something that's a lifelong passion of mine. I'm always trying to find new ways to be more productive,

create more cool things, and then to teach those principles in a way that are helpful to others. If they found this helpful to you, let me know. Message me on Twitter at Justin underscore Gary. And let me know what other tips you'd like to see, whether you want to see more short episodes like this. What kinds of subjects would you like me to cover? In any case, I'm excited to return next time with another long-form interview.

And I hope you have a wonderful time making games. Thank you so much for listening. I hope you enjoyed today's podcast. If you want to support the podcast, please rate, comment, and share on your favorite podcast platforms, such as iTunes, Stitcher, or whatever device you're listening. on. Listen to reviews and shares make a huge difference and help us grow this community and allow me to bring more amazing guests and insights to you. I've taken the insights from these interviews along with my 20 years of experience in the game industry and compressed it all into a book

with the same title as this podcast, Think Like a Game Designer. In it, I give step-by-step instructions on how to apply the lessons from these great designers and bring your own games to life. If you think you might be interested, you can check out the book at think like a game designer.com or wherever fine books are sold.