Brandon the Game Dev

When I refer to “making a game plan”, I don’t mean a plan to create a board game. I mean a game plan for tackling big, hairy audacious goals. How do you go from a big dream like “I want to create a successful board game” to reality? What does it take to make dreams come true?

The answer involves a lot of hard work, iteration, and changes in direction. Yet even with this in mind, a little bit of planning goes a long way. If you have a dream, you’re already on the right track to making a game plan. To steal a line from Stephen Covey, you’ve already “[begun] with the end in mind.”

Open up an empty document on a writing program of your choice. Write your goal at the top. Underneath it, write some basic steps that you need to complete to reach your goal. Here’s an example.

• Create War Co.
  • Design game
  • Test game
  • Buy art
  • Raise money
  • Print cards
  • Sell cards

Already you’re off to a better start than before. Take each of those steps and break them down further. Here’s another example.

• Buy art
  • Search online galleries such as DeviantArt for talented artists
  • Make a list of artists to contact
  • Keep spreadsheet to keep track of artist contact information and responses
  • Contact artists
  • Find out which artists do work for commission
  • Compare work and prices
  • Choose an artist
  • Write a contract
  • …

Continue breaking down vague steps until you have a list of specific tasks you can take action on. I like to color code my list to keep track of what I’ve done and haven’t done. Black means it’s not started. Red means barely started. Yellow means in progress. Green means significant progress. Blue means done. Here’s an example:

• Buy art
  • Search online galleries such as DeviantArt for talented artists
  • Make a list of artists to contact
  • Keep spreadsheet to keep track of artist contact information and responses
  • Contact artists
  • Find out which artists do work for commission
  • Compare work and prices
  • Choose an artist
  • Write a contract
  • …

You can always add or take away from your game plan, too. It’s not set in stone. For example, notice the item below that I added in black text:

• Buy art
  • Search online galleries such as DeviantArt for talented artists
  • Search Instagram for talented artists
  • Make a list of artists to contact
  • Keep spreadsheet to keep track of artist contact information and responses

When it’s all mapped out, you could have a game plan that’s several pages long. That’s okay! You’ll also have to adapt and change things as you go along. But when you turn your big goals into a series of small ones, it’s a lot easier.

To quote the White Stripes’ song, Little Acorns, “take all your problems and rip ‘em apart / carry them off in a shopping cart. / And another thing you should’ve known from the start / the problems in hand are lighter than at heart.”

Game development is iterative. Making a great game requires soliciting and intelligently processing feedback. It seems easy enough from the outside. Write down what people say, update your game, and save a new copy. While that method will work, I’d argue it’s not ideal.

Our world is awash in an amazing amount of data, but we’re still pretty bad at processing it. When you playtest a game, alone or with other people, you’re going to be creating a lot of data. Who played? What was the outcome? Were there any problems that stopped the game in its tracks? And so on and so on…

How do you keep track of all this information?

There’s a lot of different ways, but first start by doing two things:

1. Give each iteration of your game a version number. Every time you make a change that is not minor and superficial, up your game’s version number by one.
2. Log every single playtest with the game and make sure your playtest matches with a game version number.

Suggestion 1 is pretty straightforward, but suggestion 2 is a little more complex. First, I discourage the use of BoardGameGeek for playtest record keeping. I recommend that you use a spreadsheet. When logging your playtests, you want to capture all of the following information:

• Who played?
• How many people played?
• Who won?
• How long did the game take?
• Describe each player’s strategy.
• Were there any game-breaking flaws? If so, describe them.
• Did you catch any minor errors? If so, describe them.
• Were there any ambiguities in the rules? If so, describe them.
• Did you catch any typos, graphic issues, or small errors? If so, describe them.

The last four items give you specific data to correct your game after playtesting. Take action on these as soon as you can and create a new version of the game. Then you can focus on information that you can extrapolate from the first five pieces of data.

Who played

Regular players are less likely to stumble on rules. Repeat players are better at helping you develop nuanced strategy. Newbies are better for sussing out communication issues and confusing parts.

Number of people played

Compare with game length and figure out how much gameplay time is affected by number of players. Combine with strategy to figure which strategy works best with each number of players.

Who won

Find the best strategy, ideally with the intention to create a game which has no “one perfect strategy.” Find out how much advantage repeat players have over new players.

Game length

This can help you find conditions under which the game ends prematurely or drags on.

Game strategy

This can help you identify which strategies work and which don’t.

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The framework above gives you a lot of data to collect. How you use it is another matter entirely, and there’s no perfect answer to the question of “what’s the best way to use this data?” You’re going to have to make judgement calls and experiment over and over again until you make your perfect game.

It’s a lot easier to pursue perfection when you stay organized.

If there’s one piece of business advice I’d like to shout to the heavens, it would be “know your audience!” There are three parts to this: knowing your target audience, knowing your actual audience, and being able to tell where the two are different.

Spend any amount of time with a marketing expert talking about your business, and you’ll find that one of the first questions they ask – if not the first – is “what’s your target audience?” You must know the answer to that. You need to be able to rattle it off the top of your head without thought.

Your audience is not 18-35 year-old males. Sure, your audience may fit that description, but “18-35 year-old males” is a vague enough description to fit AXE body spray buyers or Bernie Sanders voters. Detail is crucial.

This blog, for example, is aimed at first-time indie board game developer-publishers in their 20s who are looking for “food for thought” and not just tactical advice. That gives me a nice niche to fill – I know who I’m speaking to, how to alter my language to cultural norms, what to say, and what not to say. I talk about the Motivation, Know-How, Philosophy, and Game Breakdowns as if I’m speaking to a first-time indie dev. I use the language that I’d use to talk to someone around my age. I don’t give out really gritty tactical advice like the Kickstarter Lessons blog, I’m going for something different.

As a bonus, general gamers and entrepreneurs can enjoy the blog, too, even if not everything is right up their alley. That’s the magic of a target audience: they’re like an idealized and simplified version of your more diverse actual audience. You can imagine your target audience like one person, and then speak to that person.

Yet even with this understanding, realize that your audience is made of individuals. For example, the folks backing War Co. are primarily big-time board gamers, but there’s a lot of Twitch streamers and a handful of sci-fi fans that fell in love with the game, too. I know this because I take the time to talk to a lot of them and see what makes them tick.

You might find that your actual audience doesn’t match your original expectations. That’s totally normal! Jamey Stegmaier found that the theme of his wine-making board game, Viticulture, attracted a small contingent of wine aficionados. And me? Well, I never really expected to enter the “board game industry” at all! I thought I’d just attract Magic: the Gathering and Yu-Gi-Oh! fans! Jamey amended his beliefs, as did I, and as will you as you learn more.

There’s no substitute for socializing with your audience. You’ll make some friends, and along the way, you’ll get the clarity of purpose and understanding of nuance that you need to succeed.