At around 10:30pm on Saturday night, I called my local Wal-Mart to see if they were still open. They’re the closest store to where I’m staying right now and I needed to get two things: a small sort of notebook and pens that actually worked.

I don’t even know how this ever happened, but as I looked around my hotel room I realized I had no paper to write on (aside from the back of receipts). As I started compiling a bunch of receipts to write some ideas on, I realized I had no working pens in my room whatsoever. The last pen I was carrying around in my laptop bag disappeared. Not that it was a surprise; I managed to lose my wallet earlier this week when it flew out of the same bag while I was driving. Don’t ask how, that’s not important.

I thought I struck gold when I saw my cat running around with a pen in his mouth. I figured, yes, this would allow me to be the kind of lazy I want to be on a Saturday night and not have to get right back in my car after just moments earlier returning from a little trip. After a few minutes of chasing my cat around the focal point of my hotel room (the bed), I cornered him, grabbed him, and took the pen out of his mouth.

It was a black DS stylus. I checked my DSi to ensure it still had at least one stylus that wasn’t chewed to hell and breathed a sigh of relief when I discovered that, yes, I could continue playing Chinatown Wars.

When I got back from the trip to Wal-Mart with a green composition notebook like the ones I had and never used in throughout high school and college and some Sharpie pens, I jumped on my bed, tossed on some music, and started sketching down some rough images and thoughts about an idea for a game I really wanted to work on. Except they weren’t ideas for a game. They weren’t even ideas. They were simply emotions and concepts that I wanted to make a game out of. As I willfully ignored the blinking IM windows and the e-mail buzzes on my iPhone, I stared at a somewhat blank page with completely random poorly-drawn sketches of potential iconic images I wanted to throw into this non-existent game idea. I stared at this empty sheet of paper for about forty-five minutes before giving up and throwing BlazBlue: Calamity Trigger on for some quick fun.

I’m sort of an impulsive creative. When I have random inspiration for something, I like to sit down and work on it (whatever it is) until it’s done or in a state where I feel okay leaving it for another day. That’s how I write almost every single entry to this site; very few of these entries takes me more than three or four hours of effort. That’s not because I devalue the content I put into these entries by any means. When inspiration strikes me to write something, I want to take that intensity and attachment to a given subject and expand on it as much as possible while the idea is still fresh in my mind. It’s not an ideal system, but it works for me. It was the same way when I was writing short (or not) stories. First pass was done in as few sittings as possible (often one long one) and it was cleaned up from there.

There is no real equivalent of this for games. It’s difficult to really just play around in a game sandbox and see what works and what doesn’t; “what works” and “what doesn’t” is decided once a decent amount of time has been devoted to actually getting something in a playable form (often incredibly rough). Rapidly prototyping interesting game mechanics is our industry’s best way of really testing game mechanics, but there’s not much to the “rapid” part of the name. A somewhat representative prototype takes way more than a single inspired session of worth (depending on the complexity of a mechanic).

Not that this is a bad (or good) thing by any means. It’s an adaptation of process. Conveying ideas/emotions in a game isn’t the sole responsibility of a single mechanic (or maybe it is, it’s not like there’s a hard rule), so the importance of the brainstorming and designing portion of the game’s development is increasingly important. Rather than relying on the momentary impulses of a particularly poignant idea, time is better spent writing down memorable pieces of information from that mindset for later formation into a coherent design strategy.

This entry is, primarily, a continuation to the musings of an earlier post. As is the trend lately, it’s not really a complete thought. Much like this game idea.