My daughters gave me a new sketchbook for my birthday, which got me thinking about how I use these things. Here are a few thoughts that occurred to me as I flipped through my most recent book:
- I rarely reference old drawings when I'm designing something new. There were some pages in this book I hardly recognized.
- Sometimes I find myself believing that every game that I designed before my current game came easily. If these old books are useful for anything, it's to remind me how untrue that is. I love finding old dead-ends. It's reassuring.
- In his excellent book, Sketching User Experiences, Bill Buxton compares sketching to having a conversation with yourself. I find this to be true. I rarely care about the drawings themselves—it's the act of drawing and responding to what you see that's important.
With that, here's a few snapshots from my last sketchbook. Most of these are of Pandemic: The Cure and Thunderbirds. Other drawings will have to wait until the games they accompany are released. All of these contain a self-portrait of me in the form of a shadow. Sorry about that—I've got to get a better photo rig.
One of the first sketches of the Thunderbirds board. The vertical line indicates the decision to cut the board in half at the Atlantic so Tracy Island can be in the center.
The Hood had his very own region of the world in this version. Handy!
I know enough about probability to be dangerous. Here's where I started to plot out the difficulty numbers for the various rescue missions in the Thunderbirds game.
Apparently 7s and 9s are "lame," while 8, 10, 11, and 12 are "good." I think this has \to do with whether the associated bonuses present a meaningful decision to the player.
I don't know what the note, "(Rob) Hope is lost." refers to, but it's probably something I needed to communicate to Rob Harris, not Rob Daviau since this is for Thunderbirds.
Notes from a playtest of Pandemic: The Cure
Early player dice from Pandemic: The Cure.
An early treatment center from Pandemic: The Cure. On the right you can see that I was playing with the idea that the different diseases could be increasingly hard to cure.
Who can resist the Thunderbirds machines? Certainly not me. Also: If it's not clear by now, if I can work cribbage pegs into a game, I will.
Notes on story done in preparation for Pandemic Legacy.
I'm curious—do you have a favorite way of sketching? Or do you jump right into prototype creation? Or (heaven forbid) on to the computer?
Let me know in the comments.